discourse analysis

Prévia do material em texto

An Introduction to Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts 
social and cultural perspectives and identities. Assuming no prior knowledge 
of linguistics, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis examines the field and 
presents James Paul Gee’s unique integrated approach, which incorporates 
both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research.
The third edition of this bestselling text has been extensively revised and 
updated to include new material such as examples of oral and written 
language, ranging from group discussions with children, adults, students, and 
teachers, to conversations, interviews, academic texts, and policy documents. 
While it can be used as a stand-alone text, this edition has also been fully 
cross-referenced with the practical companion title How to do Discourse 
Analysis: A Toolkit, and together they provide the complete resource for 
students with an interest in this area.
Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, An Introduction 
to Discourse Analysis includes perspectives from a variety of approaches and 
disciplines—including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthro-
pology, and communication—to help students and scholars from a range of 
backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their 
own discourse analysis.
James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy 
Studies at Arizona State University. His many titles include How to do 
Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics and Literacies, and Situated Language and 
Learning, all published by Routledge.
“Since it was first published in 1999, Gee’s An Introduction to Discourse 
Analysis has become a classic in the field. Written in a refreshing and highly 
accessible style and full of interesting, contemporary examples, this book is 
useful not just for beginners seeking to understand the personal, practical 
and political implications of how we use language to communicate, but also 
for seasoned scholars seeking new ideas and inspiration. This new edition 
is substantially revised and reorganized, making it even more user-friendly, 
and includes a wealth of new, up-to-date examples and theoretical material, 
including material on images and multimodal texts.”
Rodney Jones, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
“This useful book provides an extensive set of tools for systematically 
analyzing language use. The book reflects Gee’s broad and deep grasp of 
relevant fields, drawing on insights not only about the social life of language 
but also about social theories of late capitalism, contemporary accounts of 
culture and sociocentric approaches to the mind. Earlier editions have proven 
their usefulness to both beginning and advanced students, and this new 
edition contains the useful original material together with nice additions like 
more extensive sample analyses and a primer on analyzing multimodal texts.”
Stanton Wortham, University of Pennsylvania, USA
“Wonderful entrance point, engaging, well-grounded in the literature, and 
full of analytical insights, this book offers helpful, interesting, and practical 
examples across different aspects of discourse analysis. Gee’s accessible and 
engaging writing style and his openness to difference encourages scholars 
to begin or continue exploring the ways in which discourses operate as 
practices and activities in the world. This book stimulates various analytical, 
theoretical, and conceptual conversations among students, researchers, and 
practitioners.”
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, University of Florida, USA
An Introduction to 
Discourse Analysis
Theory and method
Third Edition
James Paul Gee
First published in the USA and Canada 1999
Second edition published 2005
Third edition published 2011
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge 
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1999, 2005, 2011 James Paul Gee
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form 
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including 
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without 
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gee, James Paul.
An introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method / James Paul Gee. — 3rd ed.
 p. cm.
1. Discourse analysis. I. Title.
 P302.G4 2010
 401’.41—dc22
 2010001121
ISBN10: 0-415-58569-4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-58570-8 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-84788-1 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-58569-9 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-58570-5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-84788-6 (ebk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
ISBN 0-203-84788-1 Master e-book ISBN
Contents
  1  Introduction  1
  2  Building Tasks  15
  3  Tools of Inquiry and Discourses  27
  4  Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality  43
  5   Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and  
    Figured Worlds  62 
  6  More on Figured Worlds  75
  7  Context  99
  8  Discourse Analysis  116
  9  Processing and Organizing Language  127
10  Sample of Discourse Analysis 1  148
11  Sample of Discourse Analysis 2  164
12  Sample of Discourse Analysis 3  176
  Appendix: Discourse Analysis for Images and Multimodal Texts  193
  Glossary  201
  Index  215
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
■■ Language as Saying, Doing, and Being  2
■■ Language and Practices  3
■■ Language and “Politics”  5
■■ Two Forms of Discourse Analysis: Descriptive and “Critical”  8
■■ About this Book: Theory and Method  10
■■ More about this Book  12
 2 Introduction
Language as Saying, Doing, and Being
What is language for? Many people think language exists so that we can “say 
things” in the sense of communicating information. However, language serves 
a great many functions in our lives. Giving and getting information is by no 
means the only one. Language does, of course, allow us to inform each other. 
But it also allows us to do things and to be things, as well. In fact, saying 
things in language never goes without also doing things and being things.
 Language allows us to do things. It allows us to engage in actions and 
activities. We promise people things, we open committee meetings, we 
propose to our lovers, we argue over politics, and we “talk to God” (pray). 
These are among the myriad of things we do with language beyond giving and 
getting information.
 Language allows us to be things. It allows us to take on different socially 
significant identities. We can speak as experts—as doctors, lawyers, anime 
aficionados, or carpenters—or as “everyday people.” To take on any identity 
at a given time and place we have to “talk the talk,” not just “walk the walk.” 
When they are being gang members, street-gang members talk a different talk 
than do honor students when they are being students. Furthermore, one and 
the same person could be both things at different times and places.
 In language, there are important connections among saying (informing), 
doing (action), and being (identity). If I say anything to you, you cannot 
really understand it fully if you do not know what I am trying to do and who 
I am trying to be by saying it. To understand anything fully you need to know 
who is saying it and what the person saying it is trying to do.
 Let’s take a simple example. Imagine a stranger on the street walks up to 
you and says “Hi, how are you?” The stranger has said something, but you do 
not know what to make of it. Who is this person?What is the stranger doing? 
 Imagine you find out that the person is taking part in a game where 
strangers ask other people how they are in order to see what sorts of 
reactions they get. Or imagine that the person is a friend of your twin and 
thinks you are your sibling (I have a twin and this sort of thing has often 
happened to me). Or imagine the person is someone you met long ago and 
have long forgotten, but who, unbeknownst to you, thinks of you as a friend. 
In one case, a gamer is playing; in another case, a friend of your sibling’s is 
mistakenly being friendly; and, in yet another case, someone who mistakenly 
thinks he is a friend of yours is also being friendly. Once you sort things out, 
everything is clear (but not necessarily comfortable).
 My doctor, who also happens to be a friend, tells me, as she greets me in 
her office: “You look tired.” Is she speaking to me as a friend (who) making 
small talk (what) or is she speaking to me as a doctor (who) making a profes-
sional judgment (what) about my health? It makes quite a big difference 
whether a friend (who) is playfully insulting (what) his friend in a bar or a 
hard-core biker (who) is threatening (what) a stranger. The words can be the 
 Introduction 3
same, but they will mean very different things. Who we are and what we are 
doing when we say things matters.
 This book is concerned with a theory of how we use language to say 
things, do things, and be things. It is concerned, as well, with a method of 
how to study saying, doing, and being in language. When I talk about “being 
things,” I will use the word “identity” in a special way. I do not mean your 
core sense of self, who you take yourself “essentially” to be. I mean different 
ways of being in the world at different times and places for different purposes; 
for example, ways of being a “good student,” an “avid bird watcher,” a 
“mainstream politician,” a “tough cop,” a video-game “gamer,” a “Native 
American,” and so on and so forth through a nearly endless list.
Language and Practices
One of the best ways to see something that we have come to take too much 
for granted (like language) is to look at an example of it that makes it strange 
again. So consider Yu-Gi-Oh!, a popular-culture activity, but one whose use of 
language will seem strange to many.
 Here are some facts about Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yu-Gi-Oh! is a card game that can 
be played face-to-face or in video games. There are also Yu-Gi-Oh! television 
shows, movies, and books (in all of which characters act out moves in the 
card game). There are thousands of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Players choose a deck 
of 40 cards and “duel” each other. The moves in the game represent battles 
between the monsters on their cards. Each card has instructions about what 
moves can be made in the game when that card is used. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a form 
of Japanese “anime,” that is, animated (“cartoon”) characters and their stories 
shown in “mangas” (comic books), television shows, and movies. Japanese 
anime is now a worldwide phenomenon. If this all seems strange to you, that 
is all to the good.
 Below I print part of the text on one card:
When this card is Normal Summoned, Flip Summoned, or Special Summoned 
successfully, select and activate 1 of the following effects: Select 1 equipped Equip 
Spell Card and destroy it. Select 1 equipped Equip Spell Card and equip it to this 
card.
 What does this mean? Notice, first of all, that you, as a speaker of English, 
recognize each word in this text. But that does you very little good. You still 
do not really know what it means if you do not understand Yu-Gi-Oh!.
 So how would you find out what the text really means? Since we are all 
influenced a great deal by how school has taught us to think about language, 
we are liable to think that the answer to this question is this: Look up what 
the words mean in some sort of dictionary or guide. But this does not help 
anywhere as much as you might think. There are web sites where you can 
 4 Introduction
look up what the words and phrases on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards mean, and this is the 
sort of thing you see if you go to such web sites:
Equip Spell Cards are Spell Cards that usually change the ATK and/or DEF of a 
Monster Card on the field, and/or grant that Monster Card special abilitie(s). They 
are universally referred to as Equip Cards, since Equip Cards can either be Equip 
Spell Cards, or Trap Cards that are treated as Equip Cards after activation. When 
you activate an Equip Spell Card, you choose a face-up monster on the field to 
equip the card to, and that Equip Spell Card’s card’s effect applies to that monster 
until the card is destroyed or otherwise removed from the field. When the equipped 
monster is removed from the field or flipped face-down, all the Equip Spell Cards 
equipped to that monster are destroyed. A fair few Equip Spell Cards are represen-
tations of weapons or armour. (http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Equip_Spell_Cards)
 Does this really help? If you do not understand the card, you do not under-
stand this much better. And think how much more of this I would have to 
give you to explicate the whole text on the Yu-Gi-Oh! card, short though it is.
 Why didn’t it help? Because, in general, if you do not understand some 
words, getting yet more of the same sorts of words does not help you know 
what the original words mean. In fact, it is hard to understand words just by 
getting definitions (other words) or other sorts of verbal explanations. Even if 
we understand a definition, it only tells us the range of meanings a word has, 
it does not really tell us how to use the word appropriately in real contexts of 
use.
 So if you had to learn what “Yu-Gi-Oh! language” actually meant, how 
would you go about it? You probably would not choose to read lots of texts 
like the one above from the web site. Even if you did, I assure you that you 
would still be lost if you had actually to play Yu-Gi-Oh!.
 The way you could best learn what the language on the card meant would 
be to learn to play the game of Yu-Gi-Oh!, not just read more text. How would 
you do this? You would watch and play games, let other players mentor you, 
play Yu-Gi-Oh! video games which coach you on how to play the game, watch 
Yu-Gi-Oh! television shows and movies which act out the game, and, then, too, 
read things.
 Why is this the best way to learn what the card means? Because, in this 
case, it is pretty clear that the language on the card gets its meaning from 
the game, from its rules and the ways players play the game. The language 
is used—together with other actions (remember language itself is a form of 
action)—to play (to enact) the game as an activity or practice in the world. 
 The language on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards does not get its meaning first and 
foremost from definitions or verbal explanations, that is, from other words. It 
gets its meaning from what it is used to do, in this case, play a game. This is 
language as doing. 
 However, Yu-Gi-Oh! is an activity—a way of doing things (in this case, 
playing a game)—because certain sorts of people take on certain sorts of 
 Introduction 5
identities, in this case identities as gamers and enthusiasts of certain sorts 
(here, fans of anime and anime card games like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and 
others). This is language as being.
 If there were no anime gamers/fans (being), then there would be no anime 
games and gaming (doing). If there were no anime gamers/fans and no anime 
games and gaming, then the words on the cards would be meaningless, there 
would be no saying (information). Saying follows, in language, from doing 
and being.
 Is this Yu-Gi-Oh! example just strange and untypical? In this book I want 
to argue that it is actually typical of how language works. Its very strangeness 
allows us to see what we take for granted in examples of language with which 
we are much more familiar and where we have forgotten the role of doing and 
being in language and remember only the role of saying andcommunicating.
 In the case of the language on the Yu-Gi-Oh! card, we said that the language 
on the card got its meaning, not from dictionaries or other words, but from a 
game and its rules and the things players do. In a sense all language gets its 
meaning from a game, though we don’t typically use the word “game.” We use 
the more arcane word “practice.”
 A game is composed of a set of rules that determines winners and 
losers. Other activities, like taking part in a committee meeting, a lecture, 
a political debate, or “small talk” among neighbors, are not games, but they 
are conducted according to certain “rules” or conventions. These “rules” 
or conventions do not determine winners and losers (usually), but they do 
determine who has acted “appropriately” or “normally” or not, and this in 
society can, indeed, be a type of winning and losing.
 These sorts of activities—things like committee meetings, lectures, political 
debates, and “small talk”—are often called “practices,” though we could just 
as well use the word “games” in an extended sense. This book will argue that 
all language—like Yu-Gi-Oh! language—gets its meaning from the games or 
practices within which it is used. These games or practices are always ways of 
saying, doing, and being. 
Language and “Politics”
If you break the rules of Yu-Gi-Oh! either you are playing the game incorrectly 
or you are attempting to change the rules. This can get you into trouble with 
the other players. If you follow the rules, you are playing appropriately and 
others will accept you as a Yu-Gi-Oh! player, though not necessarily as a good 
one. If you follow the rules—and use them well to your advantage—you may 
win the game often and others will consider you a good player.
 If you care about Yu-Gi-Oh! and want to be considered a player or even a 
good player, then having others judge you as a player or a good player is what 
I will call a “social good.” Social goods are anything some people in a society 
want and value. Being considered a Yu-Gi-Oh! player or a good Yu-Gi-Oh! 
 6 Introduction
player is a social good for some people. In that case, how they play the game 
and how others accept their game play is important and consequential for 
them.
 Above I said that just as Yu-Gi-Oh! language is used to enact the game of 
Yu-Gi-Oh!, so, too, other forms of language are used to enact other “games” 
or practices. Consider, for example, the practice (“game”) of being a “good 
student” in elementary school. In different classrooms and schools this game 
is played somewhat differently. And this game changes over time. What made 
someone a “good student” in the seventeenth century in the United States—
how “good students” talked and behaved—is different than what makes 
someone a “good student” today.
 However, in each case there are conventions (rules) about how “good 
students” talk and behave (“good students” here being the ones teachers and 
school personnel say are “good students,” that is why the phrase is in quotes). 
Many children want to be accepted in this identity, just as some people want 
to be accepted as good Yu-Gi-Oh! players. Many parents want their children to 
be accepted as “good students” as well. So being accepted as a “good student” 
is, for these people, a social good.
 In this sense, even though practices like being a “good student” are not really 
games—their “rules” or conventions are usually much less formal—there are, 
in these practices, in a sense, “winners” and “losers.” The winners are people 
who want to be accepted as a “good student” and gain such acceptance. The 
“losers” are people who want such acceptance, but do not get it. 
 There are, as we have said, different practices—different “games”—about 
how good students talk and act in different classrooms and schools. There 
are also people, like in the case of Yu-Gi-Oh!, who want to interpret the 
“rules” differently or change them altogether. For example, should it be a 
“rule” that “good students” always closely follow the teacher’s instructions or 
should “good students” sometimes innovate and even challenge teachers? Is 
a student who asks a teacher how she knows something she has claimed to 
know being a “good student” or a “problem student”?
 You may not want to be accepted as a Yu-Gi-Oh! player and maybe you 
resisted being a “good student” in school. Then these are not social goods for 
you. But some things are social goods for you. Perhaps, being accepted as an 
“acceptable” (“normal,” “good,” “adequate”) citizen, man or woman, worker, 
friend, activist, football fan, educated person, Native American, religious 
person, Christian, Jewish person, or Islamic person, or what have you, is a 
social good for you.
 The “games” or practices where you want to “win” (be accepted within 
them as “acceptable” or “good”) are cases where social goods are at stake for 
you. In these cases, how you use language (and more generally how you say, 
do, and be) and how people respond to you are deeply consequential to you 
and for you. If you get accepted—“win” the game—you gain a social good. 
If you do not get fully accepted—“lose” the game—you lose a social good.
 Introduction 7
 People fight over the rules of Yu-Gi-Oh! in terms of what they really mean 
and how exactly they should be applied. People try sometimes to change the 
rules or agree to play by somewhat different rules. So, too, with practices in 
society. People fight over what the “rules” for being a “good student” ought to 
be. They sometimes seek to change them or to agree to a new set of “rules.” 
They fight over these things because important social goods are at stake. 
 Let’s take a dramatic case to make the point clear. Marriage is a practice. 
There are formal and informal laws and conventions (rules) about how 
married people talk and act and how others talk and act in regard to marriage 
as an institution. Today, people fight over whether it is appropriate to talk 
about gay people being married to each other, whether they can rightly say 
they are married, and whether such marriages should be recognized in law or 
in church. 
 For many gay people, a failure to use the language of marriage for their 
union with each other is to deny them a social good. They fight to interpret 
the rules—or change the rules—of marriage in ways that will allow them this 
social good. For many gay people, a different term, like “legal union,” even if 
it gives all the same legal protections as marriage, is still unacceptable.
 All forms of language—like Yu-Gi-Oh! language or the language we use 
around the practice of marriage—get their meaning from the games or 
practices they are used to enact. These games or practices determine who 
is “acceptable” or “good”—who is a “winner” or “loser”—in the game or 
practice. “Winning” in these practices is often, for many people, a social 
good. Thus, in using language, social goods are always at stake, at least for 
some people. If no one cared about a game or practice anymore—no one saw 
being accepted as “acceptable” or “good” in the game or practice as important 
anymore—the game or practice would no longer have any social goods to 
offer and would cease to exist.
 Thus, in using language, social goods are always at stake. When we speak 
or write, we always risk being seen as a “winner” or “loser” in a given game 
or practice. Furthermore, we can speak or write so as to accept others as 
“winners” or “losers” in the game or practice in which we are engaged. In 
speaking and writing, then, we can both gain or lose and give or deny social 
goods. Gay people who say they are married to their partners are bidding 
for a social good. How we act out the “game” of the marriage practice in our 
society can give or deny them this social good. And how people talk about 
marriage or anything else is never just a decision about saying (informing), it 
is a decision about doing and being, as well.
 Social goods are the stuff of politics. Politics is not just about contendingpolitical parties. At a much deeper level it is about how to distribute social 
goods in a society: who gets what in terms of money, status, power, and 
acceptance on a variety of different terms, all social goods. Since, when we 
use language, social goods and their distribution are always at stake, language 
is always “political” in a deep sense. 
 8 Introduction
Two Forms of Discourse Analysis: Descriptive and “Critical” 
Discourse analysis is the study of language-in-use. There are many different 
approaches to discourse analysis (see Readings section at the end of this 
chapter). Some of them look only at the “content” of the language being 
used, the themes or issues being discussed in a conversation or a newspaper 
article, for example. Other approaches pay more attention to the structure of 
language (“grammar”) and how this structure functions to make meaning in 
specific contexts. These approaches are rooted in the discipline of linguistics. 
This book is about one such approach.
 Different linguistic approaches to discourse analysis use different theories 
of grammar and take different views about how to talk about meaning. The 
approach in this book looks at meaning as an integration of ways of saying 
(informing), doing (action), and being (identity), and grammar as a set of 
tools to bring about this integration. To take an example, consider the two 
sentences below:
1. Hornworms sure vary a lot in how well they grow.
2. Hornworm growth exhibits a significant amount of variation.
 Sentence 1 is in a style of language (called the “vernacular”) we use when 
we want to talk as an “everyday person,” not as a specialist of any kind. This 
is the identity (being) it expresses. It is a way to express an opinion based on 
one’s own observations (of hornworms in this case). This is an action (doing). 
The sentence can be used to do other actions as well, such as show surprise 
or entice someone to grow hornworms. The sentence is about hornworms, 
which are cute green caterpillars with little yellow horns. This is a part of 
what the sentence says (informing).
 Sentence 2 is in a specialist style of language, one we would associate with 
biology and biologists. It expresses one’s identity (being) as being such a specialist. 
It is not just expressing an opinion based on one’s observations of hornworms, it 
is making a claim based on statistical tests of “significance” that are “owned” and 
“operated” by the discipline of biology, not any one person, including the speaker 
or writer. This is an action (doing). The sentence is not about hornworms, 
but “hornworm growth,” an abstract trait of hornworms (much less cute than 
hornworms). This is part of what the sentence says (informing).
 The grammar (structure) of the two sentences is very different. In sentence 
1, the subject of the sentence—which names the “topic” of the sentence—is 
the noun “hornworms.” But in sentence 2, the subject is the noun phrase 
“hornworm growth.” “Hornworm growth” is a noun phrase that expresses a 
whole sentence’s worth of information (“Hornworms grow”) and is a much 
more complex structure than the simple noun “hornworms.” It is a way to 
talk about an abstract trait of hornworms, and not the hornworms themselves. 
It is also part of what makes this language “specialist” and not “everyday.”
 Introduction 9
 The phrase “significant amount of variation” in sentence 2 uses an abstract 
noun (“variation”) rather than the verb “vary” in sentence 1 and combines 
this noun with “significant amount.” So a process (varying) has been turned 
into an abstract thing (“variation”) that can be quantified using statistics 
(“significant amount”). This, too, is, again, now a way to talk about abstract 
things rather than more concrete things and processes in the world. It is also, 
again, part of what makes this language “specialist” and ties it to tools (like 
statistical tests of significance) in a discipline and not just to an individual’s 
observations in the world.
 So the grammar of the two sentences offers us different ways to say 
things that amount to different ways of doing (actions) and being (identity). 
Looking closely at the structure of language as it is being used can help us 
uncover different ways of saying things, doing things, and being things in the 
world.
 But why would we want to do this? Some approaches to discourse analysis, 
which we can call “descriptive,” answer this question by saying that their goal 
is to describe how language works in order to understand it, just as the goal of 
the physicist is to describe how the physical world works in order to under-
stand it. In both cases—the discourse analyst and the physicist—their hope 
may also be to gain deep explanations of how language or the world works 
and why they work that way. Though their work may have practical applica-
tions in the world, these discourse analysts and physicists are not motivated 
by those applications. 
 Some other approaches to discourse analysis, which we can call “critical” 
as in “critical discourse analysis,” answer this question differently. Their goal 
is not just to describe how language works or even to offer deep explanations, 
though they do want to do this. They also want to speak to and, perhaps, 
intervene in, social or political issues, problems, and controversies in the 
world. They want to apply their work to the world in some fashion.
 People who take a descriptive approach often think that a critical approach 
is “unscientific” because the critical discourse analyst is swayed by his or her 
interest or passion for intervening in some problem in the world. People who 
take a critical approach often think that a purely descriptive approach is an 
evasion of social and political responsibility.
 My view—the view in this book—is that all discourse analysis needs to be 
critical, not because discourse analysts are or need to be political, but because 
language itself is, as we have discussed above, political. I have argued that 
any use of language gains its meaning from the “game” or practice of which 
it is a part and which it is enacting. I have argued, as well, that such “games” 
or practices inherently involve potential social goods and the distribution of 
social goods, which I have defined as central to the realm of “politics.” Thus, 
any full description of any use of language would have to deal with “politics.”
 Beyond this general point, language is a key way we humans make and 
break our world, our institutions, and our relationships through how we 
 10 Introduction
deal with social goods. Thus, discourse analysis can illuminate problems and 
controversies in the world. It can illuminate issues about the distribution of 
social goods, who gets helped, and who gets harmed.
 So, as an example, consider again sentences 1 and 2 and the variant in 
sentence 3 below. Note that it is odd—a bit funny—to say something like 
sentence 3:
3. Hornworm growth sure exhibits a significant amount of variation.
 Why is this odd? It mixes “everyday language” (“sure”) with specialist 
language. “Sure” in sentence 1 is a way to express one’s attitude and emotion 
about what one has observed about hornworms. The speaker is impressed 
and a bit surprised. Perhaps, the speaker is even showing enthusiasm for 
the hornworms he or she has raised. But the “voice” of science—the “voice” 
behind sentence 2 and most of sentence 3—is not supposed to show attitude 
and emotion. It is supposed to be dispassionate, the voice of “reason.” That is 
one of the “rules” of the game of science.
 Describing these “rules”—explaining why sentence 3 is odd—is part of the 
job of any discourse analyst dealing with language like that in sentences 1–3. 
But, then, we can also ask, in specific cases, is this claim to being “dispas-
sionate” being used for authentic scientific progress or as an evasion for one’s 
own personal responsibility?
 Later in this book, in fact, we will see a case where such specialist language 
does, indeed,appear to be a way to hide and evade the ethical and emotional 
dilemmas of what was done in an experiment. Since this is part of the saying, 
doing, being going on in specific language-in-use, it is our responsibility 
as discourse analysts to study it, even though we are then having to make 
judgments with consequences in the world. In this sense, all discourse 
analysis is critical discourse analysis, since all language is political and all 
language is part of the way we build and sustain our world, cultures, and 
institutions. So, then, too, all discourse analysis is “practical” or “applied,” 
since it uncovers the workings—for good or ill—of this world building.
About this Book: Theory and Method
Now it is time to turn to some “truth in lending” disclaimers. This book is an 
introduction to one approach to discourse analysis. There are many different 
approaches to discourse analysis, none of them, including this one, uniquely 
“right.” Different approaches fit different issues and questions better or worse 
than others. And, too, different approaches sometimes reach similar conclu-
sions though they use different tools and terminologies connected to different 
“micro-communities” of researchers.
 Furthermore, the approach to discourse analysis taken in this book is not 
“mine.” No set of research tools and no theory belongs to a single person, no 
 Introduction 11
matter how much academic style and our own egos sometimes tempt us to 
write that way. I have freely begged, borrowed, and patched together. If there is 
any quality in my work, it is primarily in the “taste” with which I have raided 
others’ stores and in the way I have adapted and mixed together the ingredients 
and, thereby, made the soup. Some will, of course, not recognize the ingredient 
they have contributed, or, at least, not want to admit they do after they taste my 
soup. If there are occasional inventions, their only chance for a full life is that 
someone else will borrow them and mix them into new soup.
 This book is partly about a method of research. However, I hasten to point 
out that the whole issue of research “methods” is, as far as I am concerned, 
badly confused. First of all, any method always goes with a theory. Method 
and theory cannot be separated, despite the fact that methods are often taught 
as if they could stand alone. Any method of research is a way to investigate 
some particular domain. In this case, the domain is language-in-use. There 
can be no sensible method to study a domain unless one also has a theory 
of what that domain is. Thus, this book offers, as it must, a theory about the 
nature of language-in-use. In fact, you have already heard part of this theory: 
language-in-use is about saying-doing-being and gains its meaning from the 
“game” or practice it is part of and enacts.
 People with different theories about a domain will use different methods 
for their research. The reason this is so is because a research method is made 
up of various “tools of inquiry” and strategies for applying them. Tools of 
inquiry are designed to describe and explain what the researcher takes to 
exist and to be important in a domain. Thus, when theories about a domain 
differ—for instance, a theory about what language-in-use is or about what 
evolution is—tools of inquiry will differ as well. 
 Besides seeing that methods change with theories, it is important, as well, 
to see that research, whether in physics, literary criticism, or in discourse 
analysis, is not an algorithmic procedure; it is not a set of “rules” that can be 
followed step-by-linear-step to get guaranteed results. There is no “scientific 
method,” even in the “hard” sciences, if by this we mean such a set of rules 
to follow. Rather, research adopts and adapts specific tools of inquiry and 
strategies for implementing them. These tools and strategies ultimately reside 
in a “community of practice” formed by those engaged in such research. 
 Such tools and strategies are continually and flexibly adapted to specific 
issues, problems, and contexts of study. They are continually transformed as 
they are applied in practice. At the same time, new researchers in an area are 
normed by examples of research that more advanced researchers in the area 
take (for the time) to be “prototypical” examples of that area’s tools and strat-
egies in operation. Methods are through and through social and communal.
 This book will introduce various tools of inquiry for discourse analysis and 
strategies for using them. It will give a number of examples of the tools in 
action, as well. But the reader should keep in mind that these tools of inquiry 
are not meant to be rigid definitions. Rather, they are meant to be “thinking 
 12 Introduction
devices” that guide inquiry in regard to specific sorts of data and specific sorts 
of issues and questions. They are meant to be adapted for the reader’s own 
purposes. They are meant, as well, to be transformed as the reader adapts 
them to his or her own theory of the domain. Of course, if the reader’s theory 
gets too far away from my theory of the domain, the tools will be less and less 
easily or sensibly adaptable and useful.
 Finally, let me say that in the approach to discourse analysis taken in this 
book, I am not interested in specific analyses of data just in and for themselves. 
For me, a discourse analysis must have a point. I am not interested in simply 
describing data so that we can admire the intricacy of language, though such 
intricacy is indeed admirable. Rather, I am interested, beyond description, in 
a method that can do two things: a) illuminate and gain us evidence for our 
theory of the domain, a theory that helps to explain how and why language 
works the way it does when it is put into action; and b) contribute, in terms 
of understanding and intervention, to important issues and problems in some 
area that interests and motivates us as global citizens. 
 Thanks to the fact that, for me, discourse analyses must have a “point,” 
this book will have relevance to “applied” issues throughout, though these 
issues are not always in the foreground of attention. In discourse analysis, 
any idea that applications and practice are less prestigious, or less important, 
or less “pure” than theory has no place. Such a notion has no place, because, 
as the reader will see, the theory of language in this book is that language has 
meaning only in and through social practices, practices which often leave us 
morally complicit with harm and injustice unless we attempt to transform 
them. It is a tenet of this book that any proper theory of language is a theory 
of practice—or, as we have seen, of the “games” we humans play.
More about this Book
This book is directed at three audiences. It is meant to introduce students 
and researchers in other areas to one form of discourse analysis that I hope 
they can use and experiment with as they learn other forms of discourse 
analysis and come up with their own ideas. It is meant, as well, for people 
interested in language, culture, and institutions, but who have not focused 
their own work on discourse analysis. Finally, it is meant for my colleagues 
in discourse studies, so that they can compare and contrast their own views 
to those developed here, and so that, together, we can advance our common 
enterprise of understanding how language works in society to create worlds, 
institutions, and human relationships.
 The book is structured as follows: The “method” is fully sketched out in 
Chapter 8. Each of Chapters 2–7 discusses, with many examples, specific 
tools of inquiry that are part of the overall method and strategies for using 
them. These tools and strategies are fully embedded in a theory of language-
in-use in culture and society. Thus, that theory is also laid out in Chapters 
 Introduction 13
2–7. Chapter 7 briefly recapitulates our tools of inquiry and places them in 
the framework of an overall approach to discourse analysis.I also discuss the 
issue of validity for discourse analysis in this chapter.
 Chapter 9 deals with some linguistic details (various aspects of grammar 
and discourse) that play an important role in discourse analysis. Here issues 
about how speech is planned and produced are taken up. These linguistic 
details will, hopefully, make more sense once the “big picture” is made clear 
in Chapters 2–8, and will give readers some additional tools with which to 
deal with the empirical details of discourse analysis. Chapters 10–12 are 
extended examples of discourse analysis using some of the tools and strategies 
developed earlier in the book. These chapters are not meant to be a step-by-
step “how to” manual (for that see my book How to do Discourse Analysis, 
Routledge, 2011); they are simply meant to exemplify in practice a few of the 
tools discussed in this book. The book ends with an appendix and a glossary. 
The appendix discusses how the approach to discourse analysis discussed 
in the book can apply to images and multimodal texts (texts composed of 
images and words), both forms of communication that are ever more crucial 
in our digital age. The glossary defines key terms used in the book so readers 
can consult this list if they have forgotten where the term was introduced.
 My analyses throughout this book do not assume any specific theory of 
grammar or, for that matter, any great depth of knowledge about grammar. 
However, readers may want to supplement their reading of this book with 
some additional reading about grammar, preferably grammar as it functions 
in communication and social interaction. The best-known such “functional” 
approach to grammar is that developed by M. A. K. Halliday. Good intro-
ductory secondary sources exist on Halliday’s approach to grammar. See the 
Readings at the end of this chapter for references.
 Since this book is meant to be an “introduction,” I have tried not to clutter 
up the chapters with long lists of interpolated references. I leave references 
and suggested readings to the Readings section at the end of each chapter. 
The downside of this policy is that I will have to leave out references to the 
more specialized work of many colleagues whose work I value greatly. The 
upside is that people new to discourse analysis may actually read some of the 
material I cite and will have good places to start their further investigations. 
The material I do cite is, in most cases, replete with further references to the 
literature.
 Finally, let me explain the connection between this book and my book 
How to do Discourse Analysis mentioned above. How to do Discourse Analysis 
contains some of the same material as this book but is a more step-by-step 
guide on how to do discourse analysis. It leaves a good deal for readers to 
do in the way of working with data and engaging with their own discourse 
analyses. Those who prefer more explanation and explication may well 
prefer this book, and those who want to work through a lot of the issues for 
themselves or in collaboration with others may well prefer the other book.
 14 Introduction
Readings
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of 
conscious experience in speech and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
[An important and influential approach to discourse analysis rooted in the flow of 
ideas in the mind and in speech]
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[Excellent overview of discourse analysis within a cultural framework]
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: 
Routledge. [Fairclough offers his well-known and widely used approach to “critical 
discourse analysis”]
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. 
London: Routledge. [Discusses popular culture activities like Yu-Gi-Oh! and video 
gaming and the complex sorts of language and literacy they often involve today]
Gee, J. P. (2007). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Third Edition. 
London: Taylor & Francis. [This book applies some of the ideas about discourse 
analysis in this book to issues in education]
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[A classic approach to discourse from an anthropological linguist]
Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language 
as a social-semiotic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [A classic on the 
theoretical background of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar]
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional 
grammar. Third Edition. London: Hodder Arnold. [The most detailed and best-
known functional approach to grammar]
Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversational analysis. Malden, MA: Polity Press. 
[“CA”—which stands for “conversational analysis”—is a widely used approach to 
analyzing face-to-face conversations based in sociology]
Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., & Hamilton, H. E., Eds. (2001). The handbook of discourse 
analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell. [A good handbook with many articles repre-
senting different approaches to and areas in discourse analysis]
Thompson, G. (2004). Introducing functional grammar. Second Edition. London: 
Hodder Arnold. [A good secondary introductory source on Halliday’s functional 
approach to grammar]
Van Dijk, T. A., Ed. (1997). Discourse as social interaction. London: Sage. [This and 
the book below are both good collections of articles detailing different approaches 
to and areas in discourse analysis]
Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). Discourse as structure and process. London: Sage.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and power. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan [Van Dijk 
has done a great deal of work on using his own style of discourse analysis to deal 
with important social and political issues]
CHAPTER TWO
Building Tasks
■■ Building Things through Language  16
■■ An Example  20
 16 Building Tasks
Building Things through Language
In Chapter 1 we argued that language-in-use is about saying, doing, and 
being. We argued, as well, that by saying, doing, and being we enact certain 
“games” or “practices” (e.g., committee meetings, a Yu-Gi-Oh! play session, 
an argument in court, a turf battle between gangs, teaching reading to a first-
grade class, “small talk” with a neighbor, asking someone out on a date) 
which, in turn, give meaning to our saying, doing, and being. These “games” 
or practices always belong to social groups (e.g., street-gang members, 
lawyers, anime fans), cultures (e.g., Americans, African-Americans, Native 
Americans), or institutions (e.g., universities, schools, governments). So 
when we enact these “games” or practices, we also sustain these social groups, 
cultures, and institutions.
 Different cultures have different conventions about how to make music. 
But within any culture, each musical performer makes music that both fits 
those conventions (and, thus, is old) and is unique, played according to the 
talent and style of that performer (and, thus, is new). The same is true of 
language. We use the term “grammar” for conventions about how to speak 
and write. Each time a person uses language, that person does so in ways that 
fit the conventions (are “grammatical”) and that, at the same time, are unique, 
expressing what that person has to say and how they have chosen to say it. 
Like music, what we do with language is always both old and new.
 It is pretty clear what it means to make music, but we use language to 
make meaning, and it is not clear what that means. In the broadest sense, 
we make meaning by using language to say things that, in actual contexts of 
use, amount, as well, to doing things and being things. These things we do 
and are (identities) then come to exist in the world and they, too, bring about 
other things in the world. We use language to build things in the worldand 
to engage in world building.
 It is as if you could build a building by simply speaking words. While we 
cannot build a building by simply speaking words, there are, indeed, things 
we can build in the world by speaking words that accomplish actions and 
enact identities.
 Let’s take a very simple example. An umpire in a baseball game says 
“Strike!” and a “strike” exists in the game. That is what the rules of the game 
allow to happen. It is a strike if the umpire says it is. Similarly, the rules of 
marriage allow a marriage to actually happen in the world when a properly 
ordained minister or a judge says “I now pronounce you man and wife.” 
Umpires actually make strikes happen and ministers actually make marriages 
happen.
 These are what we can call “direct speech acts.” Saying something makes it 
so, as long as one has said it in the right circumstances (so, “promise” is also 
a direct speech act, since saying “I promise” in the right settings—e.g., not on 
a stage as part of a play—makes a promise happen). But there are also things 
 Building Tasks 17
we make happen in the world through language that do not actually require 
language, but which are much easier to do with language than without it. I 
can most certainly threaten you through gestures and behavior, but it is often 
easier to do it in language.
 We make or build things in the world through language. Not just strikes, 
marriages, and threats, but many things. For example, I can make (or break) 
a relationship with other people through language. If I talk to you in an 
informal, bonding sort of way, I am “bidding” to have you accept me as a 
friend, someone with whom you are comfortable. If you talk that way back to 
me, that sort of relationship becomes “real” (at least for that time and place) 
and has consequences in the world (e.g., it is now harder for you to turn 
down my invitation for you to come to my house for dinner).
 Whenever we speak or write, we always (often simultaneously) construct 
or build seven things or seven areas of “reality.” Let’s call these seven things 
the “seven building tasks” of language. In turn, since we use language to build 
these seven things, a discourse analyst can ask seven different questions about 
any piece of language-in-use. Below, I list the seven building tasks and the 
discourse analysis question to which each gives rise:
1. Significance
 There are things in life that are, by nearly everyone’s standards, significant 
(for example the birth or death of a child). But for many things, we need to use 
language to render them significant or to lessen their significance, to signal to 
others how we view their significance. 
 “Hornworms sure vary a lot in how well they grow” signals that the speaker 
takes the variation in the hornworms to be significant by the use of the adverb 
“sure.” This is a marker of attitude or feeling. “Hornworm growth exhibits a 
significant amount of variation” signals that the speaker takes the variation in 
the hornworms to be significant by the use of the phrase “significant amount of 
variation.” This use of the word “significant” here is a technical term and refers to 
the statistical tools of an academic discipline.
 Discourse Analysis Question: How is this piece of language being used to make 
certain things significant or not and in what ways?
2. Practices (Activities)
 We have already talked a lot about practices. By a “practice” I mean a socially 
recognized and institutionally or culturally supported endeavor that usually 
involves sequencing or combining actions in certain specified ways. Encouraging 
a student is an action, mentoring the student as his or her advisor in a graduate 
program is a practice. Telling someone something about linguistics is an action 
(informing), lecturing on linguistics in a course is a practice. Sometimes the term 
“activity” is used for what I am calling a practice.
 We use language to get recognized as engaging in a certain sort of practice 
or activity. For example, I talk and act in one way and I am engaged in formally 
opening a committee meeting; I talk and act in another way and I am engaged in 
“chit-chat” before the official start of the meeting. 
 18 Building Tasks
 When we think about practices, we confront a significant “chicken and egg” 
sort of question. What we say, do, and are in using language enacts practices. At the 
same time, what we say, do, and are would have no meaning unless these practices 
already existed.
 Which comes first then: A practice like committee meetings or the language 
we use to carry out committee meetings, our committee ways of talking and inter-
acting? Is this a “committee meeting” because we are speaking and acting this way, 
or are we speaking and acting this way because this is a committee meeting? The 
practice of committee meetings gives meaning and purpose to our language in 
the meetings and our language in the meetings enacts the committee meeting and 
makes it exist.
 The answer to this chicken and egg question is this: Language and practices 
“boot strap” each other into existence in a reciprocal process through time. We 
cannot have one without the other.
 This does, of course, raise the question of how new practices arise. Often new 
practices are variants of old ones, ones people have changed or transformed. At 
other times, new practices start by people borrowing elements of their other older 
practices to make something new. That is why computer interfaces look like and 
are talked about as “desktops.” We use something old to understand and build 
something new.
 Discourse Analysis Question: What practice (activity) or practices (activities) is 
this piece of language being used to enact (i.e., get others to recognize as going 
on)?
3. Identities
 We use language to get recognized as taking on a certain identity or role, that is, 
to build an identity here and now. For example, I talk and act in one way and I am 
speaking and acting as “chair” of the committee; at the next moment I speak and 
talk in a different way and I am speaking and acting as one peer/colleague speaking 
to another. Even if I have an official appointment as chair of the committee, I am 
not always taken as acting as the chair, even during meetings. I have to enact this 
identity at the right times and places to make it work.
 We often enact our identities by speaking or writing in such a way as to attribute 
a certain identity to others, an identity that we explicitly or implicitly compare 
or contrast to our own. We build identities for others as a way to build ones for 
ourselves. For example, it is impossible to enact a racist identity for oneself without 
building in speech or writing some sort of inferior identity for people of another 
“race.”
 Discourse Analysis Question: What identity or identities is this piece of language 
being used to enact (i.e., get others to recognize as operative)? What identity or 
identities is this piece of language attributing to others and how does this help the 
speaker or writer enact his or her own identity?
4. Relationships
 We use language to signal what sort of relationship we have, want to have, 
or are trying to have with our listener(s), reader(s), or other people, groups, or 
institutions about whom we are communicating. We use language to build social 
relationships. For example, in a committee meeting, as chair of the committee, I 
 Building Tasks 19
say “Prof. Smith, I’m very sorry to have to move us on to the next agenda item” 
and signal a relatively formal and deferential relationship with Prof. Smith. On 
the other hand, suppose I say, “Ed, it’s time to move on.” Now I signal a relatively 
informal and less deferential relationship with the same person.
 Discourse Analysis Question: What sort of relationship or relationships is this 
piece of language seeking to enact with others (present or not)?
5. Politics (the distribution of social goods)
 We use language to convey a perspective onthe nature of the distribution of 
social goods, that is, to build a perspective on social goods. For example, if I say 
“Microsoft loaded its operating system with bugs,” I treat Microsoft as purposeful 
and responsible, perhaps even culpable. I deny them a social good. If I say, on the 
other hand, “Microsoft’s operating system is loaded with bugs,” I treat Microsoft 
as less purposeful and responsible, less culpable. I am still denying them a social 
good, but I have mitigated this denial. If I say, “Like all innovative pieces of 
software, Microsoft’s operating system has bugs,” I grant Microsoft a social good 
(being innovative) and even make the bugs a sign of this, rather than a problem. 
How I phrase the matter has implications for social goods like guilt and blame, 
legal responsibility or lack of it, or Microsoft’s bad or good motives.
 Social goods are potentially at stake any time we speak or write so as to state or 
imply that something or someone is “adequate,” “normal,” “good,” or “acceptable” 
(or the opposite) in some fashion important to some group in society or society as 
a whole. In Chapter 1, I defined perspectives on the distribution of social goods as 
“politics.”
 Discourse Analysis Question: What perspective on social goods is this piece of 
language communicating (i.e., what is being communicated as to what is taken to 
be “normal,” “right,” “good,” “correct,” “proper,” “appropriate,” “valuable,” “the 
ways things are,” “the way things ought to be,” “high status or low status,” “like 
me or not like me,” and so forth)?
6. Connections 
 We use language to render certain things connected or relevant (or not) to 
other things, that is, to build connections or relevance. For example, I can talk or 
write so as to connect Christian fundamentalism in the United States to Islamic 
fundamentalism in the Middle East, or talk and write as if they are not connected 
and are very different sorts of things. Of course, using the term “fundamentalism” 
already is a way of connecting them. Things are not always inherently connected 
or relevant to each other. Often, we have to make such connections. Even when 
things seem inherently connected or relevant to each other, we can use language to 
break or mitigate such connections.
 Discourse Analysis Question: How does this piece of language connect or 
disconnect things; how does it make one thing relevant or irrelevant to another?
7. Sign Systems and Knowledge
 There are many different languages (e.g., Spanish, Russian, English). There are 
many different varieties of any one language (e.g., the language of lawyers, the 
language of biologists, the language of hip-hop artists). There are communicative 
 20 Building Tasks
systems that are not language (e.g., equations, graphs, images). These are all 
different sign systems. 
 Furthermore, we humans are always making knowledge and belief claims within 
these systems. We can use language to make certain sign systems and certain forms 
of knowledge and belief relevant or privileged, or not, in given situations, that is, 
to build privilege or prestige for one sign system or way of knowing over another. 
For example, I talk and act so as to make the knowledge and language of lawyers 
relevant (privileged), or not, over “everyday language” or over “non-lawyerly 
academic language” in our committee discussion of facilitating the admission of 
more minority students. We also use language to create, change, sustain, and revise 
language itself and other sign systems and their ways of making knowledge claims 
about the world. This is an important function, but one I will leave aside in this 
book.
 Discourse Analysis Question: How does this piece of language privilege or 
disprivilege specific sign systems (e.g., Spanish vs. English, technical language vs. 
everyday language, words vs. images, words vs. equations, etc.) or different ways 
of knowing and believing or claims to knowledge and belief (e.g., science vs. the 
Humanities, science vs. “common sense,” biology vs. “creation science”)?
An Example
We turn now to an example of discourse analysis using the questions 
generated by the seven building tasks above. It is important, at the outset, 
however, to keep several things in mind. First, since we will only be dealing 
with a small piece of data, taken from a much larger corpus, we will be 
formulating hypotheses about this data. These hypotheses would need to be 
confirmed further by looking at more data and, perhaps, engaging in the 
collection of additional data. 
 Much of discourse analysis—much of science, in general—is about formu-
lating and gaining some confidence in hypotheses which must be further 
investigated, rather than gaining any sort of “definitive proof,” which really 
does not exist in empirical investigations. We must always be open, no matter 
how confident we are in our hypotheses, to finding evidence that might go 
against our favored views.
 Second, discourse analysis is always a movement from context to language 
and from language to context. We have not yet talked about “context,” an 
extremely important notion in discourse analysis. Right now we will just use the 
term in an informal way for the actual setting in which a piece of language is 
used. In doing discourse analysis, we gain information about a context in which 
a piece of language has been used and use this information to form hypotheses 
about what that piece of language means and is doing. In turn, we closely study 
the piece of language and ask ourselves what we can learn about the context in 
which the language was used and how that context was construed (interpreted) 
by the speaker or writer and listener(s) or reader(s). In this brief example, we 
can only engage in this two-way process in a quite limited way.
 Building Tasks 21
 The data comes from a project where a university history professor (I will 
refer to her as “Sara Vogel,” not her real name) wanted to work with middle-
school teachers to have their students engage in oral history. She wanted the 
children to interview their relatives and neighbors to gain information about 
the history of their local neighborhoods and the city in which they lived. 
These oral histories were intended eventually to inform an exhibit in the city’s 
historical museum.
 The university at which the professor taught—which I will call “Woodson”—
was a small elite private university that was over a hundred years old. The city 
in which the university resided—which I will call “Middleview”—was largely 
a working-class industrial city. The teachers that the professor dealt with 
were public school teachers with working-class origins. There were historic 
town–gown tensions between the university and the city and, in particular, 
tensions between people who taught at the university and people who taught 
in the public schools, tensions over status and commitment to the city. The 
university faculty were not, by and large, born in the city and often did not 
stay there, moving on to other jobs in other cities; the public school teachers 
were invariably born there and intended to stay there.
 The data printed below comes from the first meeting of the group that 
was going to work on the oral history project in two schools. The meeting, 
held at one of the two schools to be involved in the project, was attended by 
four teachers from the two schools, the university professor and two of her 
research assistants, and a representative of a group that was helping to fund 
the joint work of the professor and the teachers. There were a few other people 
there, as well. The speaker is one of the teachers (I will call her “Karen”). She 
has been asked by the person chairing the meeting (the representative of the 
funding agency) to give those at the meeting some background on what had 
transpired prior to this first official meeting. 
 The history professor had called the curriculum coordinator at Karen’s 
school—a woman we will refer to as “Mary Washington”—toask for help on 
her project and to gain access to the school. The “Summer Institute” Karen 
refers to was a workshop on research collaborations between university 
educators and local school teachers sponsored by the Education program at 
the university. The funders of the oral history project, who were also helping 
to support the Summer Institute, had hoped that Prof. Vogel and the teachers 
she was going to work with would attend the Institute.
 So, at last, here’s the data. To make matters clearer, I leave out many details 
from the transcript, things like pausing and hesitation, details which are, 
of course, themselves also meaningful and would be included in any fuller 
analysis. I capitalize words that were said with particular emphasis:
 1. Last year, Mary Washington, who is our curriculum coordinator here, 
had a call from Sara at Woodson
 2. And called me and said: 
 22 Building Tasks
 3. “We have a person from Woodson who’s in the History Department
 4. And she’s interested in doing some research into Black history in 
Middleview
 5. And she would like to get involved with the school
 6. And here’s her number
 7. Give her a call”
 8. And I DID call her
 9. And we BOTH expected to be around for the Summer Institute at 
Woodson
10. I DID participate in it
11. But SARA wasn’t able to do THAT
 While not all building tasks will be as readily apparent in all pieces of data, 
we can always ask questions about each one to see what we get. One device 
that helps us think about what something means is to ask in what other ways 
it could have been said or written. Once we see what alternatives existed, we 
can ask why the person said or wrote it as they did and not in some alternative 
way. So let’s look at each of the building tasks in turn:
1. Significance
 How does Karen make the fact that Sara wasn’t at the Summer Institute signif-
icant? This event could have been treated as unimportant, of little significance. 
However, Karen treats it as a significant happening. 
 Karen uses her words to create a clear contrast between herself and Sara. 
Sara’s failure to attend the Summer Institute takes on significance in terms of this 
contrast. Karen portrays herself as responsible and as someone who did what she 
was told to do. She stresses this by saying “I DID call her,” instead of just “I called 
her.” She says that both (stressing “both”) she and Sara “expected” (intended) to 
be “around for the Summer Institute,” implying, perhaps, that Sara may have “been 
around,” but, nonetheless, not bothered to come. She then stresses that she herself 
did participate (note, again, “I DID participate in it” instead of “I participated” or 
just “I went”). 
 Karen concludes “But SARA wasn’t able to do THAT.” Here she uses “but” to 
create a contrast between her own behavior and Sara’s. She stresses both “Sara” and 
“that,” thereby emphasizing the contrast between herself and Sara yet more. And 
she focuses on Sara’s “ability” (“wasn’t able to do”), rather than just saying “But 
Sara didn’t come” or “Sara couldn’t come.” 
 All these details make us see that Sara’s absence from the Institute is treated by 
Karen as a significant or meaningful fact. She does not say exactly what she finds 
significant about this fact, but leaves this to be inferred by her listeners.
2. Practices (Activities)
 What social practice or activity is Karen enacting in her language? She is at an 
“official” project meeting and has been asked to “catch people up” on what has 
gone on before the meeting. She is giving the “history” of the project—a powerful 
role, since how things happened in the past and how we construe them can have 
implications for how things will go in the future. So, we can say her activity here 
 Building Tasks 23
or the practice in which she is engaging is giving a history—or telling the “origins 
story”—of the project. Some such practice is not at all uncommon in such projects.
 Karen tells this history in terms of a certain hierarchy, which she, in turn, tries 
to undo. Sara went to an administrator in Karen’s school. In turn, the administrator 
ordered Karen to call Sara. In this chain, Karen is at the bottom. However, Karen 
goes on to contrast her proactive and responsible behavior in a project that she 
didn’t ask to be on with Sara’s less proactive and responsible behavior and lesser 
commitment to a project she herself had requested and set in motion. 
 This is the first meeting of the project and Karen is seeking to position herself 
and others in terms of how they have in the past and will in the future be viewed 
and function within the project. Note the pattern: I DID . . ., we BOTH expected . . ., 
I DID . . ., But SARA wasn’t able to do THAT . . .” Karen sets herself up as a “do-er” 
and Sara as not a “do-er.” 
 Of course, Karen could have formulated her language quite differently had she 
wanted to. She could, for example, have said something like: “I called Sara and, 
while we both had expected to be around for the Summer Institute, I was able to 
attend, but Sara couldn’t make it.” This formulation does not emphasize doing on 
Karen’s part by using “did” and it formulates Sara’s lack of attendance in a way that 
stresses not her inability to come, but makes it sound as if something came up over 
which she had less control (“couldn’t make it”). This alternative way still does not, 
of course, completely mitigate the contrast, but it softens it, nonetheless.
 The point here is that a practice like “catching us up,” giving the “history,” 
telling the “origin story” (whatever we call it) is an opportunity to engage in a good 
deal of social work. Karen is telling a “story” in which, though she was ordered 
to do things (and, thus, was lower in the hierarchy), she has been, in fact, a do-er 
and leader on the project (and, thus, higher in the hierarchy). She is “bidding,” as 
well, to change the hierarchy and power relations on the project. As the project 
unfolded it was clear that Karen and the other teachers on the project wanted to be 
seen as “equals” and, in respect to their own classrooms, as the “bosses” (not the 
administrators or professors).
3. Identities
 What identity is Karen trying to take on or enact? We have already seen how 
Karen enacts in her language an identity as a proactive and responsible do-er on a 
project she did not ask for, but was “ordered” to get involved with. We have also 
seen how Karen uses an identity she attributes to others (in this case, Sara as less 
proactive and responsible) to enact, in comparison, her own identity.
4. Relationships
 What relationship is Karen trying to enact in regard to Sara and the project as a 
whole? From what we have said so far, it is clear that Karen is enacting a distanced 
but not particularly deferential relationship to Sara. The contrast of herself as 
“do-er” and Sara as not a “do-er” that she creates accomplishes this, but so does 
the fact that she uses Sara’s first name both in her introduction to her dialogue with 
the curriculum coordinator and in her concluding remark that “Sara wasn’t able to 
do that.” 
 Note, too, that in her portrayal of the dialogue with the curriculum coordinator, 
Karen uses the phrase “a person from Woodson who’s in the History Department,” 
rather than something like “a Woodson history professor” or “a professor from 
Woodson’s History Department.” We should note, too, that these references to the 
 24 Building Tasks
historian are made while the historian herself is sitting at a small table with the rest 
of the group, waiting for her turn to talk. We could ask, as well, about what sort of 
relationship Karen is attempting to create with the group as a whole and with the 
project they are embarking on.
5. Politics
 What sorts of implications for the distribution of social goods does Karen’s 
language have? Of course, one social good at stake here is Karen’s and Sara’s reputa-
tions as responsible, trustworthy people. Another is their reputationsas “do-ers” or 
people who fail to do what is needed. 
 Yet another social good at stake—one that is not readily apparent to anyone 
who does not know the situation better—is who has “rights” to school children. 
At a much later meeting of the group, the other teacher from Karen’s school (and 
her close friend) eventually makes it clear that the teachers feel that they “own” 
their children (e.g., she says “In a sense we OWN the kids”) and that researchers 
like Sara should go through teachers (contact them directly) to gain access to their 
children, not go through an authority figure like the curriculum coordinator. 
 While this became clear only in a later meeting, it helps explain some of how 
Karen’s language is designed in the short excerpt we are dealing with here. The 
other teachers in the room well knew that the way in which the professor (albeit 
inadvertently) caused the curriculum coordinator to “order” Karen to call her in 
order to get access to Karen’s class was a breach of protocol and they can clearly 
hear this in her language.
 It is clear that the way in which Karen is using language here is fully caught 
up with the “politics” of schools and universities. Social goods and hierarchies of 
status and power (themselves social goods) are at stake.
6. Connections
 How is Karen connecting things or making them relevant to each other? How is 
she disconnecting them or making them not relevant to each other? It is clear by 
now how Karen renders her attendance at the Institute and Sara’s lack of attendance 
connected and relevant to each other (“I DID. . ., we BOTH expected, I DID, but 
SARA wasn’t able to do THAT”). Furthermore, she implies that this contrast is 
relevant to the initial call Sara made to the school in the way in which she directly 
juxtaposes Sara setting the project in motion with that phone call (without Karen’s 
own initiative) only to fail to attend the initial event that was meant to facilitate the 
project and Karen’s involvement.
7. Sign Systems and Knowledge
 How is Karen privileging or disprivileging specific sign systems (languages, 
styles of language, non-verbal sign systems) or specific ways of or claims to know 
and believe? This short excerpt is really the beginning of a long struggle enacted 
in and through language as to whether teacher knowledge or university-professor 
knowledge in regard to history, teaching history, classrooms, children, and the 
community is to be privileged—and when, where, and why. This process already 
starts with the contrast between the use of the curriculum coordinator’s first and 
last name (Mary Washington) and the professor’s first name only. It is hinted at 
in the way in which the curriculum coordinator is depicted as saying “a person 
from Woodson” and “interested in doing some research into Black history in 
Middleview.” Both descriptions are vague. 
 Building Tasks 25
 “A person from Woodson” makes it sound like the curriculum coordinator does 
not really know the professor and does not cede her the authority of her rank and 
title. “Some research into Black history in Middleview” makes it sound like either 
the professor is vague about what research she wants to do (“some research on 
Black history”) or the coordinator doesn’t know or care much what it is exactly 
(and, it just so happens, the curriculum coordinator is an African-American). 
 In fact, everyone knew from the outset that the professor wanted to do oral 
history with children studying their own neighborhoods and families—that is, in 
fact, why Karen was involved, since she already did oral histories with the children 
in her class. We should keep in mind that what the curriculum coordinator says in 
Karen’s story is Karen’s depiction—with Prof. Vogel sitting there—of what was said, 
not necessarily what actually was said.
 It is clear that all the building tasks are integrally linked to each other 
and often mutually and simultaneously supported by the same words and 
phrases. We have generated some hypotheses from this small piece of data, 
based on mutual considerations of context and language-in-use. In turn, these 
hypotheses would guide our search through additional data. Our confidence 
in these hypotheses will rise if we look through more and more talk from this 
same group of people in this and subsequent meetings and we gain more and 
more evidence for our hypotheses—more and more examples that appear to 
be best explained by our hypotheses. 
 If we see these hypotheses further confirmed in other sorts of data—
perhaps in other encounters among university professors and teachers in 
this and other cities—then our confidence will rise yet more. If, in the end, 
no equally good competing hypotheses are available, then we accept our 
hypotheses, at least until disconfirming evidence appears, and work on their 
basis. This is just how all empirical research works. Unlike mathematics, 
there are no hard “proofs” to be had here.
 Our hypotheses make predictions about what we expect to find in further data 
or in a closer look at our original data. For example, by the end of our excerpt at 
line 11, we certainly have evidence that Prof. Vogel could have heard this excerpt 
as a criticism of herself. She could have heard line 11 as implying she did not have 
good reasons for not attending the Summer Institute. We would certainly want to 
look closely at Prof. Vogel’s reaction at this point, both verbally and non-verbally 
(which is why it is good to video tape and not just audio tape data). 
 When we go back and look further at our recordings, we see, from both 
verbal and non-verbal cues, that Prof. Vogel attempts to interrupt Karen 
at just the point Karen stresses the word “that” at the end of line 11. The 
professor gives a small laugh and says, in a low voice, “I heard . . . how did 
you get.” Karen speaks right through the attempted interruption, cutting it 
off, saying, “Well, so Sara and I talked a little bit about what her plans were 
and sort of what our expectations were.” We don’t know, of course, what the 
professor wanted to say, but it is clear that she had heard the end of line 11 as 
a point at which she wanted to stop Karen and interject something.
 26 Building Tasks
 In the end, in the research from which this data came, the hypotheses 
we have begun to formulate here were richly supported by more and more 
data as the project went on. These hypotheses, in turn, helped discourse 
researchers understand how and why the project, at various points, was 
failing and allowed them to help make things work a bit better. Could they 
make it “perfect”? Of course not. Some of the problems and issues (largely 
to do with status, power, and institutional conflicts) our hypotheses point 
to are entrenched problems in the real world and would require substantive 
social and institutional changes to remove. But that doesn’t mean we can’t 
do anything and it doesn’t mean we can’t start on the process of institutional 
change.
 In Chapter 8, I will elaborate further on the seven “building tasks” I have 
introduced here and their relevance for discourse analysis. But in the next 
four chapters, I want to develop several “tools of inquiry.” These are ways of 
looking at language-in-use that will help us study how the building tasks are 
carried out and with what social and political consequences. 
Readings
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: 
Harvard University Press. [A classic philosophical work on how language is as 
much about doing as saying and that, in fact, saying is a form of doing]
Hanks, W. F. (1995). Language and communicative practices. New York: Westview. [A 
wonderful and deep book on language as practice—we will discuss this book in a 
later chapter]
Searle, J. (1979). Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. [The classic book on “speech acts”]
CHAPTER THREE
Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
■■Tools  28
■■ Discourses: Whos and Whats  30
■■ “Real Indians”  31
■■ Discourses (with a Big “D”)  34
■■ Discourses are not “Units” with Clear Boundaries  36
■■ Discourses as “Kits”  39
■■ Note  40
 28 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
Tools
In the last chapter we looked at seven “building tasks,” seven areas or 
things that we use language to enact or build in the world. We now turn 
to some tools we can use to analyze the workings of these building tasks in 
specific instances of language-in-use. The tools of inquiry I introduce in this 
chapter are primarily relevant to how people build identities and practices 
and recognize identities and practices that others are building around them. 
However, the tools of inquiry introduced here are most certainly caught up 
with all the other building tasks we discussed in the last chapter, as well, and 
we will see this progressively throughout this book. 
 The tools of inquiry to be discussed in this chapter are:
a) Social languages. People use different styles or varieties of language for 
different purposes. They use different varieties of language to enact and 
recognize different identities in different settings; they also use different 
varieties of language to engage in all the other building tasks discussed in 
the last chapter. I will call each such variety a “social language.” 
 For example, a student studying hornworms might say in everyday 
language, a variety of language often referred to as “vernacular language,” 
something like “Hornworms sure vary a lot in how big they get,” while 
the same student might use a more technical variety of language to say or 
write something like “Hornworm growth exhibits a significant amount of 
variation.” The vernacular version is one social language and the technical 
version is another. Investigating how different social languages are used 
and mixed is one tool of inquiry for engaging in discourse analysis.
b) Discourses. People build identities and activities not just through 
language, but by using language together with other “stuff” that isn’t 
language. If you want to get recognized as a street-gang member of a 
certain sort you have to speak in the “right” way, but you also have to 
act and dress in the “right” way, as well. You also have to engage (or, at 
least, behave as if you are engaging) in characteristic ways of thinking, 
acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, and believing. You also have to use 
or be able to use various sorts of symbols (e.g., graffiti), tools (e.g., a 
weapon), and objects (e.g., street corners) in the “right” places and at 
the “right” times. You can’t just “talk the talk,” you have to “walk the 
walk” as well. 
 The same is true of doing/being a corporate lawyer, Marine sergeant, 
radical feminist, or a regular at the local bar. One and the same person 
might talk, act, and interact in such a way as to get recognized as a 
“street-gang member” in one context and, in another context, talk, act, 
and interact in quite different ways so as to get recognized as a “gifted 
student.” And, indeed, these two identities, and their concomitant ways of 
talking, acting, and interacting, may well conflict with each other in some 
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 29
circumstances (where different people expect different identities from the 
person), as well as in the person’s own mind. 
 I use the term “Discourse,” with a capital “D,” for ways of combining 
and integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, 
valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular 
sort of socially recognizable identity. Thinking about the different Discourses 
a piece of language is part of is another tool for engaging in discourse analysis.
c) Conversations. Sometimes when we talk or write, our words don’t just 
allude or relate to someone else’s words (as in the case of intertextuality), 
but they allude or relate to themes, debates, or motifs that have been the 
focus of much talk and writing in some social group with which we are 
familiar or in our society as a whole. These themes, debates, or motifs play 
a role in how language is interpreted. For example, how do you know that 
when I tell you “Smoking is associated with health problems” that I mean 
to say that smoking leads to health problems and not that health problems 
lead people to smoke because, say, their health problems are making them 
nervous and they are smoking in order to calm themselves down (the 
most probable meaning for a sentence like “Writing a will is associated 
with health problems”)? You know this because you are well aware of the 
long-running discussions in our society over the ill-effects of smoking. 
 I refer to all the talk and writing that has gone on in a specific social 
group or in society at large around a major theme, debate, or motif as a 
“Conversation” with a capital “C,” using the term metaphorically, of course. 
Most of us today are aware of the societal Conversations going on around 
us about things like abortion, creationism, global warming, terrorism, 
and so on and so forth through many other issues. To know about these 
Conversations is to know about the various sides one can take in debates 
about these issues and what sorts of people are usually on each side. As 
members of various social groups and of our society as a whole we are 
privy (know something about) a great many such Conversations. People 
interpret our language—and we interpret theirs—partly through such 
knowledge. Thinking about the different Conversations a piece of language 
impinges on or relates to is another tool for engaging in discourse analysis.
d) Intertextuality. When we speak or write, our words often allude to or 
relate to, in some fashion, other “texts” or certain types of “texts,” where 
by “texts” I mean words other people have said or written. For example, 
Wired magazine once printed a story with this title: “The New Face of 
the Silicon Age: Tech jobs are fleeing to India faster than ever. You got a 
problem with that?” (February 2004). The sentence “You got a problem 
with that?” reminds us of “tough guy” talk we have heard in many movies 
or read in books. It intrigues us that such talk occurs written in a magazine 
devoted to technology. This sort of cross-reference to another text or type 
of text I will refer to as “intertextuality.” In instances of intertextuality, one 
 30 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
spoken or written text alludes to, quotes, or otherwise relates to another 
one. 
Discourses: Whos and Whats
Let’s start by trying to get at the notion of a “big D” Discourse. A Discourse 
is a characteristic way of saying, doing, and being. When you speak or write 
anything, you use the resources of English to project yourself as a certain kind 
of person, a different kind in different circumstances. You also project yourself as 
engaged in a certain practice or activity. If I have no idea who you are and what 
you are doing, then I cannot make sense of what you have said, written, or done.
 You project a different identity at a formal dinner party than you do at the 
family dinner table. And, though these are both dinner, they are nonetheless 
different practices or activities (different “games”). The fact that people have 
differential access to different identities and practices, connected to different 
sorts of status and social goods, is a root source of inequality in society. 
Intervening in such matters can be a contribution to social justice. Since 
different identities and activities are enacted in and through language, the 
study of language is integrally connected to matters of equity and justice. 
 An oral or written “utterance” has meaning, then, only if and when it 
communicates a who and a what (see Wieder & Pratt 1990). What I mean by 
a “who” is a socially situated identity, the “kind of person” one is seeking to be 
and enact here and now. What I mean by a “what” is a socially situated practice 
or activitythat the utterance helps to constitute. Such identities and practices 
are, of course, two of the building tasks we discussed in Chapter 2.
 Lots of interesting complications can set in when we think about identity 
enacted in and through language. Whos can be multiple and they need not 
always be people. The President’s Press Secretary can issue an utterance that 
is, in fact, authored by a speech writer and authorized (and even claimed) by 
the President. In this case, the utterance communicates a sort of overlapping 
and compound who. The Press Secretary, even if she is directly quoting the 
speech writer, must inflect the remark with her own voice. In turn, the speech 
writer is both “mimicking” the President’s “voice” and creating an identity for 
the President. 
 Not just individuals, but also institutions, through the “anonymous” texts 
and products they circulate, can author or issue “utterances.” For example, 
we will see below that the warning on an aspirin bottle actually communi-
cates multiple whos. An utterance can be authored, authorized by, or issued 
by a group or a single individual. 
 Finally, we can point out that whos and whats are not really discrete and 
separable. You are who you are partly through what you are doing, and what 
you are doing is partly recognized for what it is by who is doing it. So it is 
better, in fact, to say that utterances communicate an integrated, though often 
multiple or “heteroglossic,” who-doing-what. 
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 31
“Real Indians”
Though I have focused on language, thus far, it is important to see that 
making visible and recognizable who (identity) we are and what (practice) 
we are doing always requires more than language. It requires, as well, that 
we act, think, value, and interact in ways that together with language render 
who we are and what we are doing recognizable to others (and ourselves). 
In fact, to be a particular who and to pull off a particular what requires that 
we act, value, interact, and use language in sync with or in coordination with 
other people and with various objects (“props”) in appropriate locations and 
at appropriate times.
 To see this wider notion of language as integrated with “other stuff” (other 
people, objects, values, times, and places), we will briefly consider Wieder 
and Pratt’s fascinating work on how Native Americans recognize each other 
as “really Indian” (their work is based on a variety of different groups, though 
no claim is made that it is true of all Native American groups). Wieder and 
Pratt point out that real Indians “refer to persons who are ‘really Indian’ in 
just those words with regularity and standardization” (p. 48—all page refer-
ences are to Wieder & Pratt 1990). Wieder and Pratt’s work will also make 
clear how the identities (the whos) we take on are flexibly negotiated in actual 
contexts of practice.
 The term “real Indian” is, of course, an “insiders’ term.” The fact that it is 
used by some Native Americans in enacting their own identity work does not 
license non-Native Americans to use the term. Thus, though it may clutter 
the text, I will below always place the term “real Indian” in scare quotes to 
make clear that I am talking about the term and not claiming that I have the 
“right” to actually use it of anyone. Finally, let me say that I am not discussing 
Native Americans here because I think they are “esoteric.” In fact, I am using 
this example because I think it is a clear and dramatic example of what we all 
do all the time, though in different ways.
 The problem of “recognition and being recognized” is very consequential 
and problematic for Native Americans. While, in order to be considered a 
“real Indian,” one must be able to make some claims to kinship with others 
who are recognized as “real Indians,” this by no means settles the matter. 
People with such (biological) ties can fail to get recognized as a “really 
Indian,” and people of mixed kinship can be so recognized.
 Being a “real Indian” is not something one can simply be. Rather, it is 
something that one becomes or is in the doing of it, that is, in the performance. 
Though one must have certain kinship ties to get into the “game,” beyond 
this entry criterion, there is no being (once and for all) a “real Indian,” rather 
there is only doing being-or-becoming-a-“real-Indian.” If one does not continue 
to “practice” being a “real Indian,” one ceases to be one. 
 Finally, “doing” being-and-becoming-a-”real-Indian” is not something 
that one can do all by oneself. It requires the participation of others. One 
 32 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
cannot be a “real Indian” unless one appropriately recognizes other “real 
Indians” and gets recognized by others as a “real Indian” in the practices of 
doing being-and-becoming-a-“real-Indian.” Being a “real Indian” also requires 
appropriate accompanying objects (props), times, and places.
 There are many ways one can do being-and-becoming-a-“real-Indian.” 
Some of these are (following Wieder and Pratt): “Real Indians” prefer to avoid 
conversation with strangers, Native American or otherwise. They cannot be 
related to one another as “mere acquaintances,” as some “non-Indians” might 
put it. So, for “real Indians,” any conversation they do have with a stranger 
who may turn out to be a “real Indian” will, in the discovery of the other’s 
“Indianness,” establish substantial obligations between the conversational 
partners just through the mutual acknowledgment that they are “Indians” and 
that they are now no longer strangers to one another. 
 In their search for the other’s “real Indianness” and in their display of their 
own “Indianness,” “real Indians” frequently engage in a distinctive form of 
verbal sparring. By correctly responding to and correctly engaging in this 
sparring, which “Indians” call “razzing,” each participant further establishes 
cultural competency in the eyes of the other. 
 “Real Indians” manage face-to-face relations with others in such a way that 
they appear to be in agreement with them (or, at least, they do not overtly 
disagree); they are modest and “fit in.” They show accord and harmony and 
are reserved about their own interests, skills, attainments, and positions. “Real 
Indians” understand that they should not elevate themselves over other “real 
Indians.” And they understand that the complex system of obligations they 
have to kin and other “real Indians” takes priority over those contractual 
obligations and pursuit of self-interest that some “non-Indians” prize so highly. 
 “Real Indians” must be competent in “doing their part” in participating in 
conversations that begin with the participants exchanging greetings and other 
amenities and then lapsing into extended periods of silence. They must know 
that neither they nor the others have an obligation to speak—that silence on 
the part of all conversants is permissible. 
 When they are among “Indians,” “real Indians” must also be able to 
perform in the roles of “student” and “teacher” and be able to recognize the 
behaviors appropriate to these roles. These roles are brought into play when 
the appropriate occasion arises for transmitting cultural knowledge (i.e., 
things pertinent to being a “real Indian”). Although many “non-Indians” find 
it proper to ask questions of someone who is instructing them, “Indians” 
regard questions in such a situation as being inattentive, rude, insolent, and 
so forth. The person who has taken the role of “student” shows attentiveness 
by avoiding eye contact and by being silent. The teaching situation, then, as 
a witnessed monologue, lacks the dialogical features that characterize some 
Western instruction. 
 While the above sort of information gives us something of the flavor of 
what sorts of things one must do and say to get recognized as a “real Indian,” 
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 33
such information can lead to a bad mistake. It can sound as if the above 
features are necessary and sufficientcriteria for doing being-and-becoming-a-
“real-Indian.” But this is not true. 
 These features are not a test that can be or ever is administered all at once, 
and once and for all, to determine who is or is not a “real Indian.” Rather, the 
circumstances under which these features are employed by “Indians” emerge 
over the course of a developing history among groups of people. They are 
employed always in the context of actual situations, and at different times in 
the life history of groups of people. The ways in which the judgment, “He (or 
she) is (or is not) a ‘real Indian,’ ” is embedded within situations that motivate 
it make such judgments intrinsically provisional. Those now recognized can 
spoil their acceptance or have it spoiled and those not now accepted can have 
another chance, even when others are reluctant to extend it.
 The same thing applies, in fact, in regard to many other social identities, 
not just being “a real Indian.” There are no once and for all tests for who 
is a “real” feminist, gang member, patriot, humanist, cutting-edge scientist, 
“yuppie,” or “regular” at the local bar. These matters are settled provisionally 
and continuously, in practice, as part and parcel of shared histories and 
ongoing activities. 
 Different social identities (different whos) may seriously conflict with one 
another. For instance, Scollon and Scollon 1981 point out that for the Native 
Americans they studied (Athabaskans in Canada and the U.S.), writing essays, 
a practice common in school, can constitute a crisis in identity. To produce 
an essay requires the Athabaskan to produce a major self-display, which is 
appropriate to Athabaskans only when a person is in a position of dominance 
in relation to the audience (in the case of school, this is the teacher, not the 
student). 
 Furthermore, in essayist prose, the audience and the author are “fiction-
alized” (not really me and you, but decontextualized and rather generic 
“types” of readers and writers) and the text is decontextualized from specific 
social networks and relationships. Where the relationship of the communi-
cants is decontextualized and unknown, Athabaskans prefer silence. 
 The paradox of prose for Athabaskans, the Scollons point out, is that if it is 
communication between known author and audience it is contextualized and 
compatible with Athabaskan values, but not good essayist prose. To the extent 
that it becomes decontextualized and thus good essayist prose, it becomes 
uncharacteristic of Athabaskans to seek to communicate. What is required 
to do and be an Athabaskan is in large part mutually exclusive with what it 
is required to do and be a writer of school-based essayist prose. This doesn’t 
mean Athabaskans cannot do both (remember, we are all multiple), it simply 
means that they may face very real conflicts in terms of values and identity. 
And, as the Scollons point out, many other groups of people have similar or 
related “identity issues” with essayist literacy.
 34 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
Discourses (with a Big “D”)
So how does someone get recognized as a “real Indian” (a who) engaged 
in verbal sparring of the sort “real Indians” do (a what)? Such matters are 
consequential, as we said above. By correctly engaging in this sparring (which 
“Indians” call “razzing”) participants establish their cultural competency to 
and for each other. This is a problem of “recognition and being recognized.”
 The problem of “recognition and being recognized” is very consequential, 
not only for Native Americans, but for all of us all the time. And, as we saw 
above, making visible and recognizable who we are and what we are doing 
always involves a great deal more than “just language.” Think of about 
how someone gets recognized as a “good student,” a “good cook,” a “gang 
member,” a “competent lawyer,” a “real basketball fan,” or a “real Catholic.” 
These all involve acting-interacting-thinking-valuing-talking-(sometimes 
writing-reading) in the “appropriate way” with the “appropriate” props at the 
“appropriate” times in the “appropriate” places. 
 “Good cooks” cannot just talk a good game. They have to be able to use 
recipes, utensils, and ingredients in a sort of “dance” of coordinating every-
thing together. They also have to value certain things (e.g., presentation of 
food, combinations of tastes, pairings of food and wine) in certain ways. 
 How do we know a young child is becoming part of a literate Discourse 
(being-doing literacy of a certain sort)? We test that the child can turn a 
book right side up, knows what books are for, can interact with a parent 
appropriately while being read too, can engage in pretend book readings (i.e., 
“talk like a book”), and values books enough not to tear them apart. We test 
all this before a child can actually decode print (it is all part of what we call 
“emergent literacy,” by which we mean a child is emerging into a “literate” 
sort of person).
 Such socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of 
thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, in the “right” places and at the 
“right” times with the “right” objects (associations that can be used to identify 
oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network”), I will 
refer to as “Discourses,” with a capital “D.” I will reserve the word “discourse,” 
with a little “d,” to mean language-in-use or stretches of language (like conver-
sations or stories). “Big D” Discourses are always language plus “other stuff.” 
 There are innumerable Discourses in any modern, technological, urban-
based society: for example, (enacting) being something as general as a type 
of African-American or Anglo-Australian or something as specific as being a 
type of modern British young second-generation affluent Sikh woman. Being 
a type of middle-class American, factory worker, or executive, doctor or 
hospital patient, teacher, administrator, or student, student of physics or of 
literature, member of a club or street gang, regular at the local bar, or, as we 
have just seen, “real Indian” are all Discourses. Discourses are about being 
different “kinds of people.”
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 35
 The key to Discourses is “recognition.” If you put language, action, 
interaction, values, beliefs, symbols, objects, tools, and places together in 
such a way that others recognize you as a particular type of who (identity) 
engaged in a particular type of what (activity), here and now, then you have 
pulled off a Discourse (and thereby continued it through history, if only for 
a while longer). Whatever you have done must be similar enough to other 
performances to be recognizable. However, if it is different enough from 
what has gone before, but still recognizable, it can simultaneously change 
and transform Discourses. If it is not recognizable, then you’re not “in” the 
Discourse.
 Discourses are always embedded in a medley of social institutions, and 
often involve various “props” like books and magazines of various sorts, 
laboratories, classrooms, buildings of various sorts, various technologies, and a 
myriad of other objects from sewing needles (for sewing circles) through birds 
(for bird watchers) to basketball courts and basketballs (for basketball players). 
Think of all the words, symbols, deeds, objects, clothes, and tools you need 
to coordinate in the right way at the right time and place to “pull off” (or 
recognize someone as) being a cutting-edge particle physicist or a Los Angeles 
Latino street-gang member or a sensitive high-culture humanist (of old).
 It is sometimes helpful to think about social and political issues as if it 
is not just us humans who are talking and interacting with each other, but, 
rather, the Discourses we represent and enact, and for which we are “carriers.” 
The Discourses we enact existed before each of us came on the scene and 
most of them will exist long after we have left the scene. Discourses, through 
our words and deeds, have talkedto each other through history, and, in doing 
so, form human history.
 Think, for instance, of the long-running and ever-changing historical 
interchange in the U.S. and Canada between the Discourses of “being an 
Indian” and “being an Anglo” or of the different, but equally long-running, 
historical interchange in New Zealand between “being a Maori” and “being 
an Anglo” (or, for that matter, think of the long-running interchange between 
“being a British Anglo” and “being an American Anglo”). Think of the long-
running and ever-changing interchange between creationists and biologists. 
Think of the long-running and ever-changing interchange in Los Angeles 
between African-American teenage gang members and the L.A. police (some 
of whom, for instance, are leading experts, even academically speaking, on 
the “grammar” of gang graffiti, which varies significantly, by the way, between 
African-American gangs and Latino gangs). Intriguingly, we humans are very 
often unaware of the history of these interchanges, and, thus, in a deep sense, 
not fully aware of what we mean when we act and talk.
 When we discussed being a “real Indian,” we argued that “knowing how” to be 
a “real Indian” rests on one’s being able to be in sync with other “real Indians” and 
with objects (e.g., the material items of the culture) in the appropriate times and 
places. Recent studies of science suggest much the same thing is true for scientists. 
 36 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
 For example, these studies argue that the physics that the experimental 
physicists “know” is, in large part, not in their heads. Rather, it is spread out 
(distributed), inscribed in (and often trapped in) scientific apparatus, symbolic 
systems, books, papers, and journals, institutions, habits of bodies, routines of 
practice, and other people. Each domain of practice, each scientific Discourse—
for example, a specific area within physics or biology—attunes actions, 
expressions, objects, and people (the scientists themselves) so that they become 
“workable” in relation to each other and in relation to tools, technologies, 
symbols, texts, and the objects they study in the world. They are “in sync.” 
 Just as there are verbal and non-verbal ways to be a “real Indian,” there are 
verbal and non-verbal ways to be a “real experimental physicist.” Being an 
experimental physicist or being a “real Indian” are ways with words, feelings, 
values, beliefs, emotions, people, actions, things, tools, and places that allow 
us to display and recognize characteristic whos doing characteristic whats. 
They are both, then, Discourses.
 The scientist’s “know-how” is the ability to coordinate and be coordinated 
by constellations of expressions, actions, objects, and people. In a sense, 
the scientist is both an actor (coordinating other people and various things, 
tools, technologies, and symbol systems) and a patient (being coordinated by 
other people and various things, tools, technologies, and symbol systems). 
Scientists become agent-patients “in sync with,” “linked with,” “in association 
with,” “in coordination with,” however we want to put it, other “actants” 
(adapting a term from Latour 2005), such as particular forms of language, 
other people, objects (e.g., scientific equipment, atoms, molecules, or birds), 
places (e.g., labs or fields), and non-verbal practices.
 In the end a Discourse is a “dance” that exists in the abstract as a coordi-
nated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, 
and places and in the here and now as a performance that is recognizable as 
just such a coordination. Like a dance, the performance here and now is never 
exactly the same. It all comes down, often, to what the “masters of the dance” 
(the people who inhabit the Discourse) will allow to be recognized or will be 
forced to recognize as a possible instantiation of the dance.
Discourses are not “Units” with Clear Boundaries
The notion of Discourses will be important throughout this book. It is important, 
therefore, to make some points clear to avoid some common misunderstandings. 
Imagine I freeze a moment of thought, talk, action, or interaction for you, in 
the way in which a projector can freeze a piece of film. To make sense of that 
moment, you have to recognize the identities and practices (activities) involved 
in it. Perhaps for this frozen moment you can’t do so, so you move the film back 
and forward enough until you can make such a recognition judgment. 
 “Oh, now I see,” you say. “It’s a ‘real Indian’ razzing another ‘real Indian’,” 
or “It’s a radical feminist berating a male for a crass patriarchal remark” or “It’s 
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 37
a laboratory physicist orienting colleagues to a graph” or “It’s a first-grader in 
Ms X’s class starting a sharing time story.” Perhaps if you now move the film 
backwards and forwards a bit more, you will change your judgments a little, 
a lot, or not at all.
 Perhaps you are not sure. You and I even argue about the matter. You say 
that “It’s a skinhead sending intimidating glances to a passing adult on the 
street” and I say, “No, it’s just a wanna-be trying to act tough.” You say, “It’s 
a modern classroom teacher leading a discussion” and I say, “No, it’s a tradi-
tional teacher giving a hidden lecture in the guise of a series of known-answer 
questions to the students.” 
 This is what I call “recognition work.” People engage in such work when 
they try to make visible to others (and to themselves, as well) who they 
are and what they are doing. People engage in such work when they try to 
recognize others for who they are and what they are doing. People engage 
in such work within interactions, moment by moment. They engage in such 
work when they reflect on their interactions later. They engage in such work, 
as well, when they try to understand human interaction as researchers, practi-
tioners, theoreticians, or interventionists of various sorts.
 Sometimes such recognition work is conscious, sometimes it is not. 
Sometimes people have labels they can articulate for the whos and whats 
they recognize, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they fight over the labels, 
sometimes they don’t. And the labels change over time.
 Thanks to the fact that we humans engage in recognition work, Discourses 
exist in the world. For example, there is a way of being a kindergarten student in 
Ms X’s class with its associated activities and ways with words, deeds, and things. 
Ms X, her students, her classroom, with its objects and artifacts, and character-
istic practices (activities), are all in the Discourse she and her students create. 
These same people and things, of course, can be in other Discourses, as well.
 Recognition work and Discourses out in the world go hand-in-hand. Ms 
X and her students engage in recognition work, for example, when a certain 
sort of sharing time (“show and tell”) story isn’t recognized as “acceptable” 
in this class and another type is. That recognition work creates a Discourse, 
that is, ways with words, actions, beliefs, emotions, values, interactions, 
people, objects, tools, and technologies that come to constitute “being and 
doing a student in Ms X’s class.” In turn, this Discourse renders recognition 
work possible and meaningful. It’s another “chicken and egg” question, then: 
Which comes first, recognition work or Discourses? Neither. They are reflex-
ively related, such that each creates the other.
 Discourses have no discrete boundaries because people are always, in 
history, creating new Discourses, changing old ones, and contesting and 
pushing the boundaries of Discourses. You, an African-American male, 
speak and act here and now in an attempt to get recognized as a “business 
manager coaching a project team.” If you get recognized as such, then your 
performance is in the Discourse of business management. If you don’t, it isn’t. 
 38 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
 If your performance has been influenced, intentionallyor not, by another 
one of your Discourses (say, your membership in the Discourse of doing and 
being a jazz fan or your membership in a certain version of African-American 
culture as a Discourse), and it gets recognized in the business management 
Discourse, then you just, at least for here and now, “infected” one Discourse 
with another and widened what “counts” in the new capitalist management 
Discourse. You pushed the boundaries. In another time and place they may 
get narrowed.
 You can get several of your Discourses recognized all at once. You (thinking 
of one my esteemed friends and colleagues at a university where I previously 
worked) “pull off” being here and now, in a class or meeting, for example, “a 
British, twice-migrant, globally oriented, traditional and modern, fashionable, 
female, Sikh, American professor of cultural studies and feminist postmodern 
anthropology” by weaving strands of your multiple Discourses together. If 
this sort of thing gets enacted and recognized enough, by enough people, then 
it will become not multiple strands of multiple Discourses interleaved, but a 
single Discourse whose hybridity may ultimately be forgotten. The point is 
not how we “count” Discourses; the point is the performance, negotiation, 
and recognition work that goes into creating, sustaining, and transforming 
them, and the role of language (always with other things) in this process.
 Let me make several other brief, but important points about Discourses:
1. Discourses can split into two or more Discourses. For example, medieval 
“natural philosophy” eventually split into philosophy and physics and 
other sciences. 
2. Two or more Discourses can meld together. For example, after the movie 
Colors came out, many years ago now, mixed Latino, African-American, 
and white gangs emerged. Prior to that, Latinos, African-Americans, and 
whites had quite separate ways of being and doing gangs, as they still do 
in the case of segregated gangs. 
3. It can be problematic whether a Discourse today is or is not the same as 
one in the past. For example, modern medicine bears little similarity to 
medicine before the nineteenth century, but, perhaps, enough to draw 
some important parallels for some purposes, though not for others.
4. New Discourses emerge and old ones die all the time. For example, 
some years ago, in Palmdale, California (a desert community outside 
Los Angeles), and I assume other places, as well, an anti-racist skinhead 
Discourse was dying out because people, including the police, tended 
to confuse its members with a quite separate, but similar looking, racist 
Neo-Nazi skinhead Discourse. 
5. Discourses are always defined in relationships of complicity and contes-
tation with other Discourses, and so they change when other Discourses 
in a society emerge or die. For example, the emergence of a “new male” 
Discourse in the 1970s (ways of doing and being a “new male”) happened 
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 39
in response to various gender-based Discourses (e.g., various sorts of 
feminism) and class-based Discourses (the baby-boom middle class was 
too big for all young males to stay in it, so those who “made it” needed to 
mark their difference from those who did not), and, in turn, changed the 
meanings and actions of these other Discourses.
6. Discourses need, by no means, be “grand” or large scale. I used to eat 
regularly at a restaurant with a long bar. Among regulars, there were two 
different Discourses at opposite ends of the bar, that is, different ways 
of being and doing at each end of the bar. One involved young men and 
women and a lot of male-dominated sexual bantering; the other involved 
older people and lots of hard-luck stories. The restaurant assigned 
different bartenders to each end (always a young female at the young end) 
and many of the bartenders could fully articulate the Discourse at their 
end of the bar and their role in it.
7. Discourses can be hybrids of other Discourses. For example, the school 
yards of many urban middle and high schools are places where teenagers 
of different ethnic groups come together and engage in what I have 
elsewhere called a “borderland Discourse” of doing and being urban 
teenager peers, when they cannot safely go into each other’s neighbor-
hoods and when they each have their own neighborhood peer-based 
Discourses. The borderland Discourse is quite manifestly a mixture of the 
various neighborhood peer Discourses, with some emergent properties of 
its own.
8. There are limitless Discourses and no way to count them, both because 
new ones, even quite non-grand ones, can always emerge and because 
boundaries are always contestable.
9. Discourses are out in the world and history as coordinations (“a dance”) 
of people, places, times, actions, interactions, verbal and non-verbal 
expression, symbols, things, tools, and technologies that betoken certain 
identities and associated activities. Thus, they are material realities. But 
Discourses exist, also, as work we humans do to get ourselves and things 
recognized in certain ways and not others. They are also the “maps” in 
our heads by which we understand society. Discourses, then, are social 
practices and mental entities, as well as material realities.
Discourses as “Kits”
If you are having trouble understanding the notion of “big D” Discourses, 
maybe this will help. Think for a minute of all the stuff you would put into 
the “Barbie doll” Discourse, restricting ourselves for the moment just to 
Barbie dolls and their accoutrements. How do you recognize something as in 
the “Barbie doll” world or Discourse, even if it hasn’t got the Barbie logo on 
it? Girl and boy (e.g., Ken) Barbie dolls look a certain way (e.g., their bodies 
have certain sorts of shapes and not others). They have characteristic sorts of 
 40 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
clothes and accessories. They talk and act in certain ways in books, games, 
and television shows. They display certain sorts of values and attitudes. This 
configuration of words and things is the Barbie doll Discourse. You interpret 
everything Barbie within this frame. It is a sort of kit made of words, things, 
clothes, values, attitudes, and so forth, from which one could build Barbie 
doll meanings. Even if you want to demean the Barbie doll Discourse by 
making a parody Barbie doll (such as Australia’s “feral Cheryl”), you have to 
recognize the Discourse in the first place.
 Now imagine real people wanted to enact a Barbie Discourse. We know 
what they would have to look, act, interact, and talk like. We know what 
values and attitudes they would have to display. We know what sorts of 
objects, accessories, and places they would associate themselves with. They 
would draw these out of their now real-world Barbie kit. In fact, young people 
sometimes talk about someone, usually a girl, as being or trying to be a Barbie 
doll type of person.
 The workings of society and history have given rise to innumerable kits 
with which we can live out our social lives as different and multiple kinds 
of people, different for different times and places—hopefully not as Barbie 
dolls, but as men, women, workers, students, gamers, lovers, bird watchers, 
environmentalists, radicals, conservatives, feminists, African-Americans, 
scientists, bar members (lawyers or drinkers) of different types, and so on 
and so forth through an endless and changing list.
Note
The term “Discourse” (with a big “D”) is meant to cover important aspects of 
what others have called: discourses (Foucault 1966); communities of practice 
(Lave & Wenger 1991); cultural communities (Clark 1996); discourse 
communities (Bizzell 1992); distributed knowledge or distributed systems 
(Hutchins 1995); thought collectives (Fleck 1979); practices (Bourdieu 
1990); cultures (Geertz 1973); activity systems (Engeström, Miettinen, & 
Punamäki 1999); actor-actant networks (Latour 2005), collectives (Latour 
2004); and (one interpretation of) “formsof life” (Wittgenstein 1958). 
 Discourses, for me, crucially involve: a) situated identities; b) ways of 
performing and recognizing characteristic identities and activities; c) ways 
of coordinating and getting coordinated by other people, things, tools, 
technologies, symbol systems, places, and times; d) characteristic ways 
of acting-interacting-feeling-emoting-valuing-gesturing-posturing-dressing-
thinking-believing-knowing-speaking-listening (and, in some Discourses, 
reading-and-writing, as well). 
 A given Discourse can involve multiple identities. For example, a teacher, 
Ms X, and her kindergarten students can take on different situated identities, 
different from each other and different within different activities, within 
the “Ms X-and-her-students’ classroom Discourse.” For instance, in one 
 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses 41
second-grade classroom I visited, one African-American boy was referred to 
as “at risk” (for school failure), “one of my good readers” (good enough to be 
in a high reading group, but not to be pulled out during reading time to go to 
the gifted program for reading, despite the fact that both groups were reading 
at the same grade level), “well behaved,” and “disaffiliated from the teacher.” 
These are all identities that the teacher’s classroom Discourse made available 
for this student. We can ask, of course, for each of these identities, and for 
other identities this child has within this classroom Discourse, which he is 
seeking to enact and which is being attributed to him based on behaviors that 
may, in fact, be bids for other identities. 
 Some people dislike the term “situated identity” and prefer, instead, 
something like “(social) position” or “subjectivity” (they tend to reserve the 
term “identity” for a sense of self that is relatively continuous and “fixed” over 
time). I use the term “identity” (or, to be specific, “socially situated identity”) 
for the multiple identities we take on in different practices and contexts and 
would use the term “core identity” for whatever continuous and relatively 
(but only relatively) “fixed” sense of self underlies our contextually shifting 
multiple identities.
Readings
Bizzell, P. (1992). Academic discourse and critical consciousness. Pittsburgh, PA: 
University of Pittsburgh Press. [Excellent book in the field of “Composition and 
Rhetoric”]
Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Stanford, CA: 
Stanford University Press. [Most accessible of Bourdieu’s books—a major theorist 
on the role of practice in creating “status” in society]
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[Excellent discussion of the social aspects of language from a psychological 
perspective]
Engeström, Y., Miettinen, R. & Punamäki, R.-L., Eds. (1999). Perspectives on activity 
theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Engeström is the leading theorist 
in “activity theory” today]
Fleck, L. (1979 [1935]). The genesis and development of a scientific fact. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press. [A little-known but classic “must read” book—best 
thing ever written on the social nature of thought]
Foucault, M. (1966). The order of things: An archaeology of human sciences. New York: 
Random House. [Foucault was the major theorist of how diverse aspects of a 
society and its institutions can at times represent similar values and themes]
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretations of cultures. New York: Basic Books. [The leading 
work on culture by the twentieth century’s outstanding anthropologist]
Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people, in T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, & D. E. Wellbery, with 
A. I. Davidson, A. Swidler, & I. Watt, Eds. Reconstructing individualism: Autonomy, 
individuality, and the self in Western thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 
pp. 222–236. [Hacking’s work on how different periods of history make being 
different “kinds of people” possible or impossible is deep and deeply important]
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [A brilliant 
book on how thinking is accomplished through tools and collaboration]
 42 Tools of Inquiry and Discourses
Latour, B. (2004). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. 
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [An important book on how science 
does and can function in a democratic society, especially in regard to environmental 
issues]
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. 
Oxford: Oxford University Press. [An overall summary and introduction to Latour’s 
important and illuminating work on how humans enter into networks of things, 
tools, and other people in order to accomplish things in science and elsewhere]
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. 
New York: Cambridge University Press. [The classic work on “communities of 
practice”]
Scollon, R. & Scollon, S. W. (1981). Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic commu-
nication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. [The best book ever written on literacy and an 
outstanding discussion of the interactions between culture and discourse patterns]
Wieder, D. L. & Pratt, S. (1990). On being a recognizable Indian among Indians, in 
D. Carbaugh, Ed. Cultural communication and intercultural contact. Hillsdale, NJ: 
Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 45–64. [An insightful discussion of how people get recog-
nized as certain “kinds of people”]
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 
[Wittgenstein was perhaps the most important philosopher in the twentieth 
century. Wittgenstein’s work on “language games” is crucial for anyone interested 
in language or discourse]
CHAPTER FOUR
Social Languages, Conversations, and 
Intertextuality
■■ Whos-Doing-Whats in Language  44
■■ Social Languages  46
■■ Two Aspects of Grammar  50
■■ An Example  50
■■ Big “C” Conversations  55
■■ Intertextuality  57
■■ Social Languages, Conversations, Intertextuality, and Discourses as  
Tools of Inquiry  60
 44 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
Whos-Doing-Whats in Language
This chapter will develop three of the tools of inquiry we introduced in the 
last chapter. First I discuss social languages, then Conversations, and then 
intertextuality. Social languages are different varieties of language that allow 
us to express different socially significant identities (e.g., talking and writing 
as a mathematician, doctor, or gang member) and enact different socially 
meaningful practices or activities (e.g., offering a proof in mathematics, writing a 
prescription in medicine, demonstrating solidarity with a fellow gang member). 
 “Conversations” (with a capital “C”) are debates in society or within specific 
social groups (over focused issues like smoking, abortion, or school reform) 
that large numbers of people recognize, in terms of both what “sides” there are 
to take in such debates and what sorts of people tend to be on each side. 
 Intertextuality refers to cases where one oral or written text directly or 
indirectly quotes another text or alludes to another text in yet more subtle ways. 
 So, we turn now to the notion of social languages. The last chapter argued 
that to study language-in-use we need to study more than language alone, we 
need to study Discourses. Discourses are ways with and integrations of words, 
deeds interactions, thoughts, feelings, objects, tools, times, and places that 
allow us to enact and recognize different socially situated identities. 
 However, as linguistic discourse analysts, we often pay attention primarily 
to language and for a while, at least, we will leave non-language “stuff” out of 
consideration. When we do so, we are looking at how people communicate 
who they are and what they are doing through language. Of course, they are 
always also communicating via non-verbal elements like ways of acting, inter-
acting, valuing, thinking, and using objects,but these can be left aside for a 
while—to be returned to later for a fuller analysis—while we concentrate first 
and foremost on language. 
 I will introduce the idea of social languages through an initial discussion 
of how whos and whats are communicated in language (keeping in mind that 
language alone is rarely enough and is always put together with “other stuff” 
to pull off a Discourse). Let me give an example to make my points about 
whos-doing-whats via language-in-use more concrete. Consider, then, the 
warning on an aspirin bottle, reprinted below (italics and capitals are on the 
warning):
Warnings: Children and teenagers should not use this medication for chicken pox or 
flu symptoms before a doctor is consulted about Reye Syndrome, a rare but serious 
illness reported to be associated with aspirin. Keep this and all drugs out of the reach 
of children. In case of accidental overdose, seek professional assistance or contact 
a poison control center immediately. As with any drug, if you are pregnant or 
nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health professional before using this product. 
IT IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT NOT TO USE ASPIRIN DURING THE LAST 3 
MONTHS OF PREGNANCY UNLESS SPECIFICALLY DIRECTED TO DO SO BY 
A DOCTOR BECAUSE IT MAY CAUSE PROBLEMS IN THE UNBORN CHILD 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 45
OR COMPLICATIONS DURING DELIVERY. See carton for arthritis use1 and 
Important Notice.
 My interpretation of this text is that there are two who-doing-whats in this 
warning, and they are interleaved. That is, there are two different answers to 
the question “Who is speaking to us?” and two corresponding answers to the 
question “What are they trying to do?” The first who/what combination is 
made up of the following sentences: 
Children and teenagers should not use this medication for chicken pox or flu symptoms 
before a doctor is consulted about Reye Syndrome, a rare but serious illness reported to 
be associated with aspirin. IT IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT NOT TO USE ASPIRIN 
DURING THE LAST 3 MONTHS OF PREGNANCY UNLESS SPECIFICALLY 
DIRECTED TO DO SO BY A DOCTOR BECAUSE IT MAY CAUSE PROBLEMS IN 
THE UNBORN CHILD OR COMPLICATIONS DURING DELIVERY. 
 Here things are referred to quite specifically (“children and teenagers,” 
“this medication,” “chicken pox,” “flu,” “Reye Syndrome,” “aspirin,” “last 
3 months,” “unborn child,” “delivery”), doctors are called “doctor,” and 
matters are treated emphatically (italics, capitals, “should not,” “rare but 
serious,” “especially important,” “specifically directed”). We will see that this 
language enacts one type of who seeking to accomplish one type of what.
 The second who-doing-what combination is made up of the following 
sentences, placed in the middle of the other two:
Keep this and all drugs out of the reach of children. In case of accidental overdose, 
seek professional assistance or contact a poison control center immediately. As with 
any drug, if you are pregnant or nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health profes-
sional before using this product. 
 Here things are referred to more generally and generically (“this and all 
drugs,” “any drug,” and “this product,” rather than “this medication” and 
“aspirin”; “children” rather than “children and teenagers,” “pregnant” rather 
than “last 3 months of pregnancy”), doctors are not mentioned, rather the 
health profession is referred to more generally (“professional assistance,” 
“poison control center,” “health professional”), and matters are treated 
less stridently with the exception of the word “immediately” (here we get 
small print and the less strident phrases “keep out of the reach,” “accidental 
overdose,” “seek . . . assistance,” “seek . . . advice,” rather than the more direct 
“should not” and “important not to use” of the other part of the warning). 
This language enacts a different who seeking to accomplish a different what.
 These two who-doing-whats “feel” different. They are authorized and issued 
by different “voices” to different purposes and effects. The first speaks with 
a lawyerly voice (who) responding to specific potential legal problems and 
court cases (what); the second speaks with the official voice of a caring, but 
 46 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
authoritatively knowledgeable company (who) trying to protect and advise 
people, especially women and children, while still stressing that aspirin is not 
particularly special or dangerous compared to drugs in general (what). 
 Of course, this second who-doing-what sits in some tension with the first. 
By the way, the second who-doing-what on the aspirin bottle used to be the 
only warning on the bottle (with the order of the sentences a bit different). 
And, indeed, the warning has changed yet again on newer bottles.
 This warning, like all utterances, reflects the company it has kept, or, to 
put the matter another way, it reflects the history that has given rise to it. In 
this case, presumably, the new sterner, more direct who-doing-what was added 
to the more general and avuncular one because the company got sued over 
things like Reye Syndrome.
 The warning on the aspirin bottle is heteroglossic. That is, it is “double-
voiced,” since it interleaves two different whos-doing-whats together. Of 
course, in different cases, this sort of interleaving could be much more 
intricate, with the two (or more) whos-doing-whats more fully integrated, and 
harder to tease apart.
Social Languages
There is another term that it is useful in place of the cumbersome phrase 
“who-doing-what” as far as the language aspects of “who-doing-whats” are 
concerned (remembering that, in reality, language is caught up with “other 
stuff” in Discourses). This term is “social language.” Each of the who-doing-
whats we saw on the aspirin bottle are linguistically expressed in different “social 
languages” (different socially significant varieties of language). All languages, 
like English or French, are composed of many (a great many) different social 
languages. Social languages are what we learn and what we speak.
 Keep in mind that “social languages” and “Discourses” are terms for 
different things. I will use the term “social languages” to talk about the role 
of language in Discourses. But, as I said above, Discourses always involve 
more than language. They always involve coordinating language with ways 
of acting, interacting, valuing, believing, feeling, and with bodies, clothes, 
non-linguistic symbols, objects, tools, technologies, times, and places.
 Let me give a couple of examples of social languages at work, beyond the 
example of the two different social languages in the warning on the aspirin 
bottle, examples I have used over the years as particularly clear instances of 
different social languages. Consider, for instance, the following case of an upper-
middle-class, Anglo-American young women named “Jane,” in her twenties, 
who was attending one of my courses on language and communication. The 
course was discussing different social languages and, during the discussion, 
Jane claimed that she herself did not use different social languages in different 
contexts, but, rather, was consistent from context to context. In fact, to do 
otherwise, she said, would be “hypocritical,” a failure to “be oneself.” 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 47
 In order to support her claim that she did not switch her style of speaking 
in different contexts and for different conversational partners, Jane decided to 
record herself talking to her parents and to her boyfriend. In both cases, she 
decided to discuss a story the class had discussed earlier, so as to be sure that, 
in both contexts, she was talking about the same thing. 
 In the story, a character named Abigail wants to get across a river to see her 
true love, Gregory. A riverboat captain (Roger) says he will take her only if she 
consents to sleep with him. In desperation to see Gregory, Abigailagrees to 
do so. But when she arrives and tells Gregory what she has done, he disowns 
her and sends her away. There is more to the story, but this is enough for 
our purposes here. Students in my class had been asked to rank-order the 
characters in the story from the most offensive to the least.
 In explaining to her parents why she thought Gregory was the worst (least 
moral) character in the story, the young woman said the following:
Well, when I thought about it, I don’t know, it seemed to me that Gregory should 
be the most offensive. He showed no understanding for Abigail, when she told him 
what she was forced to do. He was callous. He was hypocritical, in the sense that 
he professed to love her, then acted like that.
 Earlier, in her discussion with her boyfriend, in an informal setting, she 
had also explained why she thought Gregory was the worst character. In this 
context she said:
What an ass that guy was, you know, her boyfriend. I should hope, if I ever did that 
to see you, you would shoot the guy. He uses her and he says he loves her. Roger 
never lies, you know what I mean?
 It was clear—clear even to Jane—that Jane had used two very different 
forms of language. The differences between Jane’s two social languages are 
everywhere apparent in the two texts. 
 To her parents, she carefully hedges her claims (“I don’t know,” “it 
seemed to me”); to her boyfriend, she makes her claims straight out. To 
her boyfriend, she uses terms like “ass” and “guy,” while to her parents 
she uses more formal terms like “offensive,” “understanding,” “callous,” 
“hypocritical” and “professed.” She also uses more formal sentence structure 
to her parents (“it seemed to me that . . .,” “He showed no understanding for 
Abigail, when . . .,” “He was hypocritical, in the sense that . . .”) than she does 
to her boyfriend (“. . . that guy was, you know, her boyfriend,” “Roger never 
lies, you know what I mean?”). 
 Jane repeatedly addresses her boyfriend as “you,” thereby noting his social 
involvement as a listener, but does not directly address her parents in this way. 
In talking to her boyfriend, she leaves several points to be inferred, points that 
she spells out more explicitly to her parents (e.g., her boyfriend must infer 
that Gregory is being accused of being a hypocrite from the information that 
 48 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
though Roger is bad, at least he does not lie, which Gregory did in claiming 
to love Abigail).
 All in all, Jane appears to use more “school-like” language to her parents. 
Her language to them requires less inferencing on their part and distances 
them as listeners from social and emotional involvement with what she 
is saying, while stressing, perhaps, their cognitive involvement and their 
judgment of her and her “intelligence.” Her language to her boyfriend 
stresses, on the other hand, social and affective involvement, solidarity, and 
co-participation in meaning making. 
 This young woman is making visible and recognizable two different 
versions of who she is and what she is doing. In one case she is “a dutiful 
and intelligent daughter having dinner with her proud parents” and in the 
other case she is “a girlfriend being intimate with her boyfriend.” Of course, 
I should add, that while people like Jane may talk at dinner this way to their 
parents, not all people do; there are other identities one can take on for one’s 
parents, other social languages one can speak to them. And, indeed, there may 
well be others that Jane would use to her parents in different settings.
 Let me give one more example of social languages at work, an example 
taken from Greg Myers’ work (see Myers 1990; all page numbers below refer 
to this work). Biologists, and other scientists, write differently in professional 
journals than they do in popular science magazines. These two different ways 
of writing do different things and display different identities. The popular 
science article is not merely a “translation” or “simplification” of the profes-
sional article.
 To see this, consider the two extracts below, the first from a professional 
journal, the second from a popular science magazine, both written by the 
same biologist on the same topic (p. 150):
Experiments show that Heliconius butterflies are less likely to oviposit on host plants 
that possess eggs or egg-like structures. These egg-mimics are an unambiguous 
example of a plant trait evolved in response to a host-restricted group of insect 
herbivores. (Professional journal)
Heliconius butterflies lay their eggs on Passiflora vines. In defense the vines seem 
to have evolved fake eggs that make it look to the butterflies as if eggs have already 
been laid on them. (Popular science)
 The first extract, from a professional scientific journal, is about the 
conceptual structure of a specific theory within the scientific discipline of 
biology. The subject of the initial sentence is “experiments,” a methodological 
tool in natural science. The subject of the next sentence is “these egg-mimics”: 
note how plant-parts are named, not in terms of the plant itself, but in terms 
of the role they play in a particular theory of natural selection and evolution, 
namely “coevolution” of predator and prey (that is, the theory that predator 
and prey evolve together by shaping each other). Note also, in this regard, the 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 49
earlier “host plants” in the preceding sentence, rather than the “vines” of the 
popular passage.
 In the second sentence, the butterflies are referred to as “a host-restricted 
group of insect herbivores,” which points simultaneously to an aspect of 
scientific methodology (like “experiments” did) and to the logic of a theory 
(like “egg-mimics” did). Any scientist arguing for the theory of coevolution 
faces the difficulty of demonstrating a causal connection between a particular 
plant characteristic and a particular predator when most plants have so many 
different sorts of animals attacking them. A central methodological technique 
to overcome this problem is to study plant groups (like Passiflora vines) 
that are preyed on by only one or a few predators (in this case, Heliconius 
butterflies). “Host-restricted group of insect herbivores,” then, refers to both 
the relationship between plant and insect that is at the heart of the theory 
of coevolution and the methodological technique of picking plants and 
insects that are restricted to each other so as to “control” for other sorts of 
interactions. 
 The first passage, then, is concerned with scientific methodology and a 
particular theoretical perspective on evolution. On the other hand, the second 
extract, from a popular science magazine, is not about methodology and 
theory, but about animals in nature. The butterflies are the subject of the first 
sentence and the vine is the subject of the second. Further, the butterflies and 
the vine are labeled as such, not in terms of their role in a particular theory. 
 The second passage is a story about the struggles of insects and plants 
that are transparently open to the trained gaze of the scientist. Further, the 
plant and insect become “intentional” actors in the drama: the plants act in 
their own “defense” and things “look” a certain way to the insects, they are 
“deceived” by appearances as humans sometimes are. 
 These two examples replicate in the present what, in fact, is an historical 
difference. In the history of biology, the scientist’s relationship with nature 
gradually changed from telling stories about direct observations of nature 
to carrying out complex experiments to test complex theories. Myers argues 
that professional science is now concerned with the expert management of 
uncertainty and complexity, and popular science with the general assurance 
that the world is knowable by and directly accessible to experts. 
 The need to “manage uncertainty” was created, in part, by the fact thatmounting “observations” of nature led scientists, not to consensus, but to 
growing disagreement as to how to describe and explain such observations. 
This problem led, in turn, to the need to convince the public that such uncer-
tainty did not damage the scientist’s claim to professional expertise or the 
ultimate “knowability” of the world. 
 This example lets us see, then, not just that ways with words are connected 
to different whos (here the experimenter/theoretician versus the careful 
observer of nature) and whats (the professional contribution to science 
and the popularization of it), but that they are always acquired within and 
 50 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
licensed by specific social and historically shaped practices representing the 
values and interests of distinctive groups of people.
 So, it is clear now, I hope, that in using language what is at stake are 
whos-doing-whats. But, you cannot be any old who you want to. You cannot 
engage in any old what you want to. That is to say that whos and whats are 
creations in history and change in history, as we have just seen, in fact, in the 
examples from biology. 
Two Aspects of Grammar
Each social language has its own distinctive grammar. However, two different 
aspects of grammar are important to social languages. One aspect is the 
traditional set of units like nouns, verbs, inflections, phrases, and clauses. 
The other aspect is the “rules” by which grammatical units like nouns and 
verbs, phrases and clauses, are used to create patterns which signal or “index” 
characteristic whos-doing-whats-within-Discourses. That is, we speakers and 
writers design our oral or written utterances to have patterns in them in virtue 
of which interpreters can attribute situated identities and specific activities to 
us and our utterances. 
 These patterns are called “collocational patterns” by linguists. This means 
that various sorts of grammatical devices “co-locate” with each other. The 
patterns I am trying to name here are “co-relations” (correlations) among 
different grammatical units. These correlations, in turn, also co-relate to 
(coordinate with) other non-language “stuff” to constitute (for historical, i.e., 
conventional reasons) whos-doing-whats-within-Discourses.
 For example, in Jane’s utterance to her boyfriend, “What an ass that guy 
was, you know, her boyfriend,” note how informal terms like “ass” and “guy,” 
the vague reference “that guy,” the informal parenthetical device “you know,” 
and the informal syntactic device of “right dislocation” (i.e., letting the phrase 
“her boyfriend” hang out at the end of the sentence) all pattern together to 
signal that this utterance is in an informal social language used to achieve 
solidarity. 
 The situation here is much like choosing clothes that go together in such 
a way that they communicate that we are engaged in a certain activity or are 
taking up a certain style connected to such activities. For example, consider 
how sandals, bathing suit, tank top, shades, and sun hat “co-locate” together 
to “signal” to us things like outdoor and water activities and the situated 
identities we take up in such situations.
An Example
Let me give you another example of these two aspects of grammar (traditional 
units like nouns and noun phrases and patterns we create out of these units). 
Consider the sentence below (adapted from Halliday & Martin 1993, p. 77):
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 51
1. Lung cancer death rates are clearly associated with an increase in smoking.
 A whole bevy of linguistic features marks this sentence as part of a 
distinctive academic social language (though without more connected text we 
can’t actually tell exactly which one). Some of these are: a heavy subject (“lung 
cancer death rates”), deverbal nouns (“increase,” “smoking”), a complex 
compound noun (“lung cancer death rates”), a “low transitive” relational 
predicate (“are . . . associated with”), passive or passive-like voice (“are . . . 
associated”), the absence of agency (no mention of who does the associating), 
an abstract noun (“rates”), and an assertive modifier to the verb (“clearly”).
 No single grammatical feature marks the social language of this sentence. 
Rather, all these features (and a great many more if we took a larger stretch of 
text, including many discourse-level features) form a distinctive configuration 
(a correlation or, better, co-relation) that marks the social language.
 I hasten to point out that the configuration of features that mark a social 
language are too complex and too situated in the specific context they are helping to 
create (after all, there is no such thing as a “general social science context”) to be 
open to much generalized and rote learning. Linguistic relationships like these 
do not exist and are not learned outside the distinctive social practices (whats) 
of which they are an integral part. They are part and parcel of the very “voice” 
or “identity” (whos) of people who speak and write and think and act and value 
and live that way (e.g., as a social scientist) for a given time and place. To learn 
such relationships is part of what it means to learn to recognize the very social 
context one is in (and helping to create). This is not to say there is no role here for 
overt instruction (there is). It is only to say that there is no way we can leave out 
immersion in situated practices if we want to teach people new social languages.
 It is sometimes said that what distinguishes “informal” social languages 
like the one Jane used to her boyfriend from more “formal” ones charac-
teristic of literacy and “literate talk,” like the social language Jane used to 
her parents, or the smoking example above, is that, in the “informal” case, 
“context” determines meaning and you just have to have been there to under-
stand what was being said. In the more “formal” cases, it is held that the 
words and sentences mean in a more explicit, less contextual way. In fact, it 
is sometimes said that such language is “decontextualized.” Some people in 
education claim that what many minority and lower socioeconomic children 
who do not succeed in school fail to know is how to use such “decontextu-
alized language.” 
 All this is seriously in error, and in ways that not only mislead us, but 
actually damage some people (e.g., the children just referred to). Consider 
sentence 1 again. This sentence is no more explicit than informal language. 
It is no less contextualized. It is simply inexplicit and contextualized in a 
different way. 
 Though we tend to think of writing, at least academic writing, as clear, 
unambiguous, and explicit in comparison to speech, sentence 1, in fact, has 
 52 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
at least 112 different meanings! What is odder still is that anyone reading 
sentence 1 (at least anyone reading this book) hits on only one of these 
meanings (or but one of a select few) without any overt awareness that the 
other 111 meanings are perfectly possible. 
 There are theories in psycholinguistics that claim that what happens in 
a case like sentence 1 is that we unconsciously consider all 112 possible 
meanings and rule out all but one, but we do this so fast and so below the 
level of consciousness that we are completely unaware of it. Be that as it may, 
how can sentence 1 have so many meanings and why do we all, nonetheless, 
hit on one and, in fact, exactly the same one? 
 This fact is due to the grammar of the sentence. The subject of sentence 
1 (“Lung cancer death rates”) is a “nominalization” made up of a compound 
noun. Nominalizations are like trash compactors: they allow one to take a lot of 
information—indeed, a whole sentence’s worth of information—and compact it 
into a compound word or a phrase. One can then insert this compacted infor-
mation into another sentence (thereby making bigger and bigger sentences). The 
trouble is this: once one hasmade the compacted item (the nominalization), it is 
hard to tell what information exactly went into it. Just like the compacted trash 
in the trash compactor, you can’t always tell exactly what’s in it.
 “Lung cancer death rates” could be a compaction of any of the following 
more expanded pieces of information:
2a. [lung cancer] [death rates] 5 rates (number) of people dying from lung 
cancer 5 how many people die from lung cancer
2b. [lung cancer] [death rates] 5 rates (speed) of people dying from lung 
cancer 5 how quickly people die from lung cancer
2c. [lung] [cancer death] [rates] 5 rates (number) of lungs dying from 
cancer 5 how many lungs die from cancer
2d. [lung] [cancer death] [rates] 5 rates (speed) of lungs dying from cancer 
5 how quickly lungs die from cancer
 The first two meanings (2a/b) parse the phrase “lung cancer death rates” as 
“lung-cancer (a disease) death-rates,” that is “death-rates from lung-cancer,” 
where “rates” can mean number of people dying or the speed of their death 
from the disease. The second two meanings (2c/d) parse the phrase “lung 
cancer death rates” as “lung cancer-death-rates,” that is “cancer-death-rates for 
lungs,” where, once again, “rates” can mean number of (this time) lungs dying 
from cancer or the speed with which they are dying from cancer. This way of 
parsing the phrase is analogous to the most obvious reading of “pet cancer 
death rates” (i.e., “cancer-death-rates for pets,” that is, how many/how fast 
pets are dying from cancer). Of course, everyone reading this book interpreted 
“lung cancer death rates” to be a compaction of 2a. Our question is why?
 Consider now the verbal phrase “are clearly associated with” in sentence 
1. Such rather “colorless” relational predicates are typical of certain social 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 53
languages. Such verbal expressions are ambiguous in two respects. In the first 
place, we cannot tell whether “associated with” indicates a relationship of 
causation or just correlation. Thus, does sentence 1 say that one thing causes 
another (e.g., smoking causes cancer) or just that one thing is correlated with 
another (smoking and cancer are found together, but, perhaps, something else 
causes both of them)? 
 In the second place, even if we take “associated with” to mean cause, we 
still cannot tell what causes what. You and I may know, in fact, that smoking 
causes cancer, but sentence 1 can perfectly mean that lung cancer death rates 
lead to increased smoking. “Perhaps,” as Halliday and Martin remark, “people 
are so upset by fear of lung cancer that they need to smoke more in order to 
calm their nerves” (pp. 77–78). It is even possible that the writer did not want 
to commit to a choice between cause and correlate, or to a choice between 
smoking causing cancer or fear of cancer causing smoking. This gives us at 
least the following meaning possibilities for the verbal phrase “are clearly 
associated with”:
3a. cause
3b. caused by
3c. correlated with
3d. writer does not want to commit herself
 Now, let’s finish with the phrase “increase in smoking.” This is another 
nominalization, compacting information. Does it mean “people smoke more” 
(smokers are increasing the amount they smoke), or “more people smoke” 
(new smokers are being added to the list of smokers), or is it a combination 
of the two, meaning “more people smoke more”? 
 We can also ask, in regard to the death rates and the increased smoking 
taken together, if the people who are increasing their smoking (whether old 
smokers or new ones) are the people who are dying from lung cancer, or 
whether other people are dying as well (e.g., people who don’t smoke, but, 
perhaps, are “associated with” smokers). Finally, we can ask of the sentence 
as a whole, whether it is representing a “real” situation (“because more people 
are smoking more people are dying”) or just a hypothetical one (“if more 
people were to smoke we know more people would die”)? This gives us at 
least seven more meaning possibilities:
4a. increased smoking 5 people smoke more
4b. increased smoking 5 more people smoke
4c. increased smoking 5 more people smoke more
4d. the same people are smoking and dying
4e. the people smoking and dying are not all the same
4f. the situation being talked about is real (because)
4g. the situation being talked about is hypothetical (if)
 54 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
 We now have considered 4 possible meanings for the subject (“lung 
cancer death rates”), 4 possible meanings for the verbal phrase (“are clearly 
associated with”) and 7 possibilities for the complement (“an increase in 
smoking”). Like an old-fashioned Chinese menu, you can take one from list 
A and another from list B and yet another from list C and get a specific combi-
nation of meanings. This gives us 4 times 4 times 7 possibilities, that is, 112 
different possible meanings. 
 All of these meanings are perfectly allowed by the grammar of sentence 
1. And, in fact, there are other possibilities I have not discussed, e.g., taking 
“rates” to mean “monetary costs” or “lung cancer death rates” to be the rates 
at which lung cancer is dying. And yet—here’s our mystery again—everyone 
reading this book in a micro second hit on just one of these many meanings 
and the same one (or, at worst, consciously considered a very few of the possi-
bilities). Why?
 The answer to the mystery I am discussing here may be perfectly obvious 
to you, but I want to suggest that, nonetheless, it is important for how we 
view language and language learning. We all hit on only one (and the same 
one) of the 112 meanings because we have all been part of—we have all been 
privy to—the ongoing discussion in our society about smoking, disease, 
tobacco companies, contested research findings, warnings on cartons, ads that 
entice teens to smoke, and so on and so forth through a great many complex 
details. 
 Given this discussion as background, sentence 1 has one meaning. 
Without that discussion—with only the grammar of English in one’s head—
the sentence has more than 112 meanings. Obviously, however important 
grammar is, the conversation is more important. It leaves open one meaning 
(or a small number of possibilities, like allowing that sentence 1 also covers 
people getting lung cancer from secondary smoke).
 A more technical way to put this point is this: meaning is not merely a matter 
of decoding grammar, it is also (and more importantly) a matter of knowing 
which of the many inferences that one can draw from an utterance are relevant. 
And “relevance” is a matter deeply tied to context, point of view, and culture. 
One knows what counts for a given group of people at a given time and place 
as “relevant” by having been privy to certain discussions those people have 
heretofore had. If there had been a major discussion about environmentally 
induced lung cancer in a nervous society, then sentence 1 could perfectly well 
have been taken to mean that the prevalence of lung cancer is causing many 
more people to turn to smoking to calm their nerves (2a 1 3a 1 4b).
 So, we have concluded, we speak and write not in English alone, but 
in specific social languages. The utterances of these social languages have 
meaning—or, at least, the meanings they are, in fact, taken to have—thanks 
to being embedded in specific social discussions. Though I have established 
these points in regard to a single sentence (sentence 1 above), I take them to 
be generally true. 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 55
 To teach someone the meaning of sentence 1—or any sentence for that 
matter—is to embed them in the conversational sea in which sentence 1 
swims. To teach someone the sort of social language in which sentences like 
sentence 1 occur is to embed them in the discussions that have recruited (and 
which, in turn, continually reproduce) that social language.
Big “C” Conversations
Now it is time to become clearerabout what I mean by the word “discussion” 
above when I said things like “The utterances of these social languages have 
meaning—or, at least, the meanings they are, in fact, taken to have—thanks 
to being embedded in specific social discussions.” When we talk about things 
like the general societal discussion around issues like abortion or smoking, 
we are using the word “discussion” in a partly metaphorical way, of course. 
We are talking about the public debates that swirl around us in the media, in 
our reading, and in our interactions with other people, not any one specific 
discussion among specific people. On certain issues (e.g., abortion, smoking, 
gambling, feminism, affirmative action, etc.) you know what the “sides” are, 
how they are talked about, and what sort of people tend to be on specific 
sides. Some of these sorts of issues are known by nearly everyone in a 
society, others are known only by specific social groups (e.g., the ongoing big 
controversies in a given academic field). This knowledge is an ever-present 
background you can bring to interpret things you hear and read or in terms 
of which you can formulate your own talk and writing. 
 I will call such public debates, arguments, motifs, issues, or themes 
“Conversations” with a capital “C,” speaking metaphorically as if the various 
sides in debates around issues like abortion or smoking were engaged in one 
big grand conversation (or debate or argument, whatever we want to call it). 
Of course, this big Conversation is composed of a myriad of interactional 
events taking place among specific people at specific times and places.
 Let me give you an example of what I am trying to get at here. It is 
fashionable today for businesses to announce (in “mission statements”) their 
“core values” in an attempt to create a particular company “culture” (see 
Collins & Porras 1994; examples below are from pp. 68–69). For instance, 
the announced core values of Johnson & Johnson, a large pharmaceutical 
company, include “The company exists to alleviate pain and disease” and 
“Individual opportunity and reward based on merit,” as well as several others. 
 One might wonder, then, what the core values of a cigarette company 
might be. Given the Conversations that most of us are familiar with—about 
the U.S. and its history, as well as about smoking—we can almost predict 
what they will be. For example, the espoused core values of Philip Morris, 
a large company which sells cigarettes among a great many other products, 
include “The right to personal freedom of choice (to smoke, to buy whatever 
one wants) is worth defending,” “Winning—being the best and beating 
 56 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
others,” and “Encouraging individual initiative,” as well as (in a statement 
similar to one of Johnson & Johnson’s statements) “Opportunity to achieve 
based on merit, not gender, race, or class.”
 We all readily connect Philip Morris’s core-value statements to themes of 
American individualism and freedom. Note how the values of “individual 
initiative” and “reward for merit,” which are part of the core values of both 
Johnson & Johnson and Philip Morris, take on a different coloring in the two 
cases. In the first case, they take on a humanistic coloring, and in the other, 
the coloring of “every man for himself.” This coloring is the effect of our 
knowledge of the two sides to the “smoking Conversation” in which, we all 
know, individual freedom is pitted against social responsibility.
 Note here, then, how values, beliefs, and objects play a role in the sorts of 
Conversations I am talking about. We know that in this Conversation some 
people will hold values and beliefs consistent with expressions about individ-
ualism, freedom, the “American way,” and so forth, while others will express 
values and beliefs consistent with the rights of others, social responsibility, 
and protecting people from harm, even harm caused by their own desires. In 
turn, these two value and belief orientations can be historically tied to much 
wider dichotomies centering around beliefs about the responsibilities and the 
role of governments.
 Furthermore, within this Conversation, an object like a cigarette or 
an institution like a tobacco company, or an act like the act of smoking 
itself, takes on meanings—symbolic values—within the Conversation, but 
dichotomous meanings. Smoking can be seen as an addiction, an expression 
of freedom, or a lack of caring about others. The point is that those familiar 
with the Conversation know, just as they can select the meaning of sentence 
1 above out of 112 possibilities, the possible meanings of cigarettes, tobacco 
companies, and smoking.
 The themes and values that enter into Conversations circulate in a 
multitude of texts and media. They are the products of historical disputes 
between and among different Discourses. Think, for example, of the historic 
debate between the Discourse of evolutionary biologists and the Discourse 
of fundamentalist creationists. This debate, over time, has constituted a 
Conversation that many people in society know something about. For that 
reason it is hard for a newspaper to discuss evolution in any terms without 
triggering people to think about this debate and to try to interpret what the 
newspaper is saying in terms of it. 
 Of course, people today often know these themes and values without 
knowing the historical events that helped create or sustain them in the past 
and pass them down to us today. For example, in the nineteenth century in 
Massachusetts, courts were asked to return escaped slaves to their Southern 
“owners” (von Frank 1998). These court battles, and the accompanying 
controversies in newspapers and public meetings, engaged two distinctive 
Discourses, among several others (for example, several Discourses connected 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 57
to Black churches and to Massachusetts’ significant population of free Black 
people, some of them professionals, such as ministers, doctors, and lawyers—
note that it is hard to know what to call these people: they were of African 
descent, born in the U.S., but were not full citizens).
 One Discourse, connected to people like Emerson and Thoreau, 
championed freedom, personal responsibility, and morality as constituting 
a “higher law” than the law of states, the federal government, or the courts. 
They argued and fought, not only to not return the slaves, but to disobey 
the court and the federal officials seeking to enforce its mandate. The other 
Discourse, heavily associated with nationally oriented political and business 
elites, championed the rule of law at the expense of either the slaves’ freedom 
or one’s own personal conscience. 
 These two Discourses were, by no means, just “statements” and “beliefs.” 
There were, for example, distinctive ways, in mind, body, and social practice, 
to mark oneself, in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, as a “Transcendentalist” 
(i.e., a follower of Emerson and his colleagues) and to engage in social activ-
ities seen as part and parcel of this identity. 
 Many people today have no knowledge of the debates over escaped slaves 
in Massachusetts and nationally in the nineteenth century (though these 
debates, of course, helped lead to the Civil War). However, these debates 
sustained, transformed, and handed down themes and values that are quite 
recognizable as parts of ongoing Conversations in the mid twentieth century 
(e.g., in the Civil Rights Movement) and today. 
 Of course, I must hasten to add, again, that a number of other important 
Discourses played a significant role in the escaped-slave cases in Massachusetts. 
Blacks were part of some integrated Discourses, as well as their own distinctive 
Discourses, as well. Furthermore, all these Discourses interacted with each 
other, in complex relations of alliance and contestation, with some important 
overlaps between Discourses (e.g., between the Transcendentalistsand John 
Brown’s distinctive and violent Discourse in regard to slavery and abolition).
 Because people are often unaware of historical clashes among Discourses, it 
is often easier to study Conversations, rather than Discourses directly, though 
it is always important and interesting to uncover the historical antecedents 
of today’s Conversations. The point is, though, that the historical interactions 
of Discourses lead to certain debates (“Conversations”), for example debates 
over smoking or race, being known widely by people in a society or social 
group, even by people who are not themselves members of those Discourses 
or even aware of their histories.
Intertextuality
The term “social language” applies to specific varieties of language used to 
enact specific identities and carry out specific sorts of practices or activities. 
A single written or oral text can be in one social language or it can switch 
 58 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
between two or more or even mix them up pretty thoroughly. The warning 
from the aspirin bottle switches back and forth between two different varieties 
of language.
 Sometimes, however, a text spoken or written in one variety of language 
(one social language) will accomplish a sort of switching by incorporating 
(“borrowing”) words from another text spoken or written in the same or a 
different variety of language. Such borrowing we will call “intertextuality.” 
One text can incorporate words from another one in a great variety of 
different ways. It can directly quote another text (as in “Shakespeare said 
‘Love is such sweet sorrow’ ”), or indirectly quote it (as in “Shakespeare said 
that love was such sweet sorrow”), or just allude to what hearers or readers 
in the know will realize are words taken from some other source (as in “My 
love for you is sweet sorrow, indeed”).
 Norman Fairclough has this to say about “intertextuality”: “Intertextuality 
is basically the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, 
which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may 
assimilate, contradict, ironically echo, and so forth” (Fairclough 1992, p. 84). 
 For example, consider the text below, a part of the Oakland, California, 
School Board’s official proposal to support “Ebonics” in its schools:
Whereas, numerous validated scholarly studies demonstrate that African American 
students as part of their culture and history as African people possess and utilize 
a language described in various scholarly approaches as “Ebonics” (literally Black 
sounds) or pan African Communication behaviors or African Systems; and . . . 
Whereas, the Federal Bilingual Education Act (20 USC 1402 et seq.) mandates 
that local educational agencies “build their capacities to establish, implement and 
sustain programs of instruction for children and youth of limited English profi-
ciency.” (http://linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res1.html)
 This text is an official policy document from a school board. As such it is 
written in a legalistic social language, clearly signaled by a style in which we get 
a series of sentences beginning with the word “whereas” followed by a comma 
(we only see two here, but the original text has many more). Each sentence 
following “whereas” is formal and complicated and contains a main verb in 
the present tense (“demonstrate,” “mandates”) followed by a “that” clause that 
contains another whole sentence’s worth of information (see Table 4.1 opposite).
 So we have a pretty distinctive social language here. However, this text is 
through and through intertextual in the ways in which it alludes to other texts. 
Consider the first “whereas” sentence. Here our text points to work by linguists 
(“scholarly studies demonstrate”) without directly quoting that work. However, 
any linguist will readily recognize that the linguistic work being mentioned is, 
in fact, one distinctive and recognizable type of linguistic research. The terms 
“Ebonics,” “Black sounds,” “pan African Communication behaviors,” and 
“African Systems” are all technical terms taken from and strongly associated 
with texts from one very specific type of linguistics, one carried out largely by 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 59
scholars of African or African-American descent with a strong Black Nationalist 
orientation, though after Oakland’s decision, some of these terms spread into 
wider use (terms like “African-American Vernacular English” were originally 
more widely used in linguistics, see John Baugh’s excellent work on linguistics 
and the Ebonics controversy in the Readings below). 
 Of course, it is meaningful and important that the Oakland policy document 
alludes to this type of linguistic research and not others. Furthermore, the 
document does not directly quote these linguists, but uses their words as 
part of the unquoted language of the document itself. This achieves a certain 
solidarity with this type of linguistic research and assumes without comment 
its authority over other forms of linguistic research. In fact, for readers 
uninformed about linguistics, the reference to “numerous validated scholarly 
studies” and the incorporation of words from this research without quotes 
will leave the impression that there are no other types of linguistic research 
relevant to the matter at hand. This is, by the way, typical in general of public 
policy documents. Research, when it is mentioned, tends to speak with one 
voice and a voice that supports the policy in the policy document.
 On the other hand, the second “whereas” sentence quotes directly from 
the Federal Bilingual Education Act, a piece of federal legislation. One reason 
the policy document does this is that the whole document is, in part, an 
attempt to interpret the words of this piece of legislation in a certain way. 
The first “whereas” sentence about Ebonics is already an attempt to set the 
interpretation of the federal legislation in a certain framework. Ultimately, 
the policy document wants to argue that some African-American students 
are as entitled to federal aid as bilingual students are because these African-
American students have limited proficiency not in English per se, but in the 
standard dialect of English used in schools (their native dialect is “Ebonics”). 
This argument, by the way, is fully senseful in that linguists do not make 
Subject Main verb 
1 that
Subordinate clause
Numerous 
validated 
scholarly 
studies
demonstrate 
that
African American students as part of their 
culture and history as African people possess 
and utilize a language described in various 
scholarly approaches as “Ebonics” (literally 
Black sounds) or pan African Communication 
Behaviors or African Systems;
The 
Federal 
Bilingual 
Act
mandates 
that
local educational agencies “build their 
capacities to establish, implement and sustain 
programs of instruction for children and 
youth of limited English proficiency”
Table 4.1 Analysis of Oakland School Board’s “Ebonics” proposal
 60 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality
any rigorous distinction between different dialects (e.g., there are dialects of 
German that are not mutually interpretable) and different languages (e.g., 
there are dialects of German and Dutch that are mutually interpretable).
 Thus, the Oakland text directly quotes a piece of federal legislation, setting 
it off between quotes. It allows the surrounding text (part of which is taken 
from a certain type of linguistics research which is given authority by being 
incorporated into the text more directly without direct quotation) to interpret 
it.
Social Languages, Conversations, Intertextuality, and Discourses 
as Tools of Inquiry
In this book I have treated the terms “social languages,” “Conversations,” 
“intertextuality,” and “Discourses” realistically. That is, I have spoken about 
them as things that exist in the mind and in the world. And, indeed, this is, I 
believe,both true and the easiest way to grasp what they mean and how and 
why they are significant for discourse analysis. 
 But it is important to realize that, in the end, these terms are ultimately our 
ways as theoreticians and analysts of talking about and, thus, constructing 
and construing the world. And it is in this guise that I am primarily inter-
ested in them. They are “tools of inquiry.” Social languages, Conversations, 
intertextuality, and Discourses are “thinking devices” that can guide us to ask 
certain sorts of questions. Faced with a piece of oral or written language, we 
can ask the following sorts of questions:
A. What social language(s) are involved? What sorts of grammatical patterns indicate 
this? Are different social languages mixed? How so?
B. What socially situated identities and activities do these social languages enact? 
C. What Discourse or Discourses are involved? How is “stuff” other than language 
(“mind stuff” and “emotional stuff” and “world stuff” and “interactional stuff” 
and non-language symbol systems, etc.) relevant in indicating socially situated 
identities and activities?
D. In considering this language, what sorts of relationships among different Discourses 
are involved (institutionally, in society, or historically)? How are different Discourses 
aligned or in contention here?
E. What Conversations (public debates over issues or themes) are relevant to 
understanding this language and to what Conversations does it contribute (insti-
tutionally, in society, or historically), if any?
F. How does intertexuality work in the text, that is, in what ways does the text quote, 
allude to, or otherwise borrow words from other oral or written sources? What 
function does this serve in the text?
Readings
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas 
Press. [A classic book on the ways in which conventions and creativity interact in 
language use. Bakhtin’s notion of “speech genres” is an important notion related to 
 Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality 61
my notion of “social languages” and he has a great deal to say about intertextuality, 
though he does not use that term]
Baugh, J. (1999). Out of the mouths of slaves: African-American language and educational 
malpractice. Austin: University of Texas Press [An essential source on African-
American dialects and the issues they raise in education]
Baugh, J. (2000). Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic pride and racial prejudice. New York: Oxford 
University Press. [The best discussion of the so-called “Ebonics Controversy” by 
one of the outstanding linguists writing on language, ethnicity, and culture today]
Billig, M. (1987). Arguing and thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A good discussion of what I have called 
“Conversations,” though Billig does not use the term]
Collins, J. C. & Porras, J. I. (1994). Built to last: Successful habits of visionary companies. 
New York: Harper Business. [An influential business book that discusses companies’ 
“vision statements,” statements which almost always relate to Conversations]
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. [One 
of many works by the best-known scholar in critical discourse analysis—called 
“CDA” when Fairclough’s work is being referred to]
Halliday, M. A. K. & Martin, James R. (1993). Writing science: Literacy and discursive 
power. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press. [An important discussion of 
how certain sorts of grammatical patterns characterize writing in science, with 
variation across different types of science and science writing]
Myers, G. (1990). Writing biology: Texts in the social construction of scientific knowledge. 
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. [A fascinating and important book on how 
science is written and how such writing relates to social, cultural, institutional, and 
historical factors]
von Frank, A. J. (1998). The trial of Anthony Burns: Freedom and slavery in Emerson’s 
Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [An interesting book on the 
different historically important Conversations involved in slavery and returning 
runaway slaves]
CHAPTER FIVE
Form–Function Correlations, Situated 
Meanings, and Figured Worlds
■■ Meaning  63
■■ Form–Function Correlations  63
■■ Situated Meaning  65
■■ The Frame Problem  67
■■ Critical Discourse Analysis  68
■■ Figured Worlds  69
■■ Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds  
are Tools of Inquiry  72
 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds 63
Meaning
The primary tools of inquiry we will discuss in this chapter are “form–function 
correlations,” “situated meanings,” and “figured worlds.” Form–function 
correlations deal with the general range of meanings that grammatical units 
(e.g., noun phrases, subjects of sentences, subordinate clauses) can have. 
Situated meanings deal with the highly specific meanings words and phrases 
take on in actual contexts of use. Figured worlds are (often unconscious) 
theories and stories that we humans use to understand and deal with the 
world. I will also discuss the nature of “critical discourse analysis” in this 
chapter.
Form–Function Correlations
Linguists make an important distinction between utterance-type meaning 
and utterance-token meaning. Any word, phrase, or structure has a general 
range of possible meanings, what we might call its meaning range. This is its 
utterance-type meaning. For example, the word “cat” has to do, broadly, with 
felines; the (syntactic) structure “subject of a sentence” has to do, broadly, 
with naming a “topic” in the sense of “what is being talked about.” 
 However, words and phrases take on much more specific meanings in 
actual contexts of use. These are utterance-token meanings or what I will call 
“situated meanings.” Thus, in a situation where we say something like “The 
world’s big cats are all endangered,” “cat” means things like lions and tigers; 
in a situation where we are discussing mythology and say something like 
“The cat was a sacred symbol to the ancient Egyptians,” “cat” means real and 
pictured cats as symbols; and in a situation where we are discussing breakable 
decorative objects on our mantel and say something like “The cat broke,” 
“cat” means a statue of a cat. 
 Subjects of sentences are always “topic-like” (this is their utterance-type 
meaning); in different situations of use, subjects take on a range of more 
specific meanings. In a debate, if I say, “The constitution only protects the 
rich,” the subject of the sentence (“the constitution”) is an entity about which 
a claim is being made; if a friend of yours has just arrived and I usher her in 
saying “Mary’s here,” the subject of the sentence (“Mary”) is a center of interest 
or attention; and in a situation where I am commiserating with a friend and say 
something like “You really got cheated by that guy,” the subject of the sentence 
(“you”) is a center of empathy (signaled also by the fact that the normal 
subject of the active version of the sentence—“That guy really cheated you”—
has been “demoted” from subject position through use of the “get-passive”).
 Discourse analysis can undertake one or both of two tasks: one related 
to utterance-type (general) meaning and one related to situated meaning 
(Levinson 1983). One task, then, is what we can call the utterance-type 
meaning task. This task involves the study of correlations between form 
 64 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds
and function in language at the level of utterance-type meanings (general 
meanings). “Form” here means things like morphemes, words, phrases, or 
other syntactic structures (e.g., the subject position of a sentence). “Function” 
means meaning or the communicative purpose a form carries out.
 The other task is what we can call the utterance-token meaning or situated 
meaning task.This task involves the study of correlations between form and 
function in language at the level of utterance-token meanings. Essentially, this 
task involves discovering the situation-specific or situated meanings of forms 
used in specific contexts of use.
 Failing to distinguish between these two tasks can be dangerous, since very 
different issues of validity for discourse analysis come up with each of these 
tasks, as we will see below. Let me start with an example of the utterance-
type meaning task. Specific forms in a language are prototypically used as 
tools to carry out certain communicative functions (that is, to express certain 
meanings). For example, consider the sentence labeled (1) below (adapted 
from Gagnon 1987, p. 65):
1. Though the Whig and Tory parties were both narrowly confined to the privi-
leged classes, they represented different factions and tendencies.
 This sentence is made up of two clauses, an independent (or main) clause 
(“they represented different factions and tendencies”) and a dependent clause 
(“Though the Whig and Tory parties were both narrowly confined to the 
privileged classes”). These are statements about form. An independent clause 
has as one of its functions (at the utterance-type level) that it expresses an 
assertion; that is, it expresses a claim that the speaker/writer is making. A 
dependent clause has as one of its functions that it expresses information that 
is not asserted, but, rather, assumed or taken-for-granted. These are state-
ments about function (meaning).
 Normally in English, dependent clauses follow independent clauses. Thus, 
the sentence (1) above might more normally appear as: “The Whig and 
Tory parties represented different factions, though they were both narrowly 
confined to the privileged classes.” In (1) the dependent clause has been 
fronted (placed in front of the whole sentence). This is a statement about 
form. Such fronting has as one of its functions that the information in the 
clause is thematized, that is, the information is treated as a launching-off 
point or thematically important context from which to consider the claim in 
the following dependent clause. This is a statement about function.
 To sum up, in respect to form–functioning mapping at the utterance-type 
level, we can say that sentence (1) renders its dependent clause (“Though 
the Whig and Tory parties were both narrowly confined to the privi-
leged classes”) a taken-for-granted, assumed, unargued for (i.e., unasserted), 
though important (thematized) context from which to consider the main 
claim in the independent clause (“they represented different factions and 
 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds 65
tendencies”). The dependent clause is, we might say, a concession. Other 
historians might prefer to make this concession the main asserted point and, 
thus, would use a different grammar, perhaps saying something like: “Though 
they represented different factions and tendencies, the Whig and Tory parties 
were both narrowly confined to the privileged classes.”
 At a fundamental level, all types of discourse analysis involve claims 
(however tacitly they may be acknowledged) about form–function matching 
at the utterance-type level. This is so because, if one is making claims about 
a piece of language, even at a much more situated and contextualized level 
(which we will see in a moment), but these claims violate what we know about 
how form and function are related to each other in language at the utterance-
type level, then these claims are quite suspect, unless there is evidence the 
speaker or writer is trying to violate these sorts of basic grammatical relation-
ships in the language (e.g., in poetry).
 As I have already said, the meanings with which forms are correlated at 
the utterance-type level are rather general (meanings like “assertion,” “taken-
for-granted information,” “contrast,” etc.). In reality, they represent only 
the meaning potential or meaning range of a form or structure, as we have 
said. The more specific or situated meanings that a form carries in a given 
context of use must be figured out by an engagement with our next task, the 
utterance-token or situated-meaning task.
 Form–function correlations give another “tool of inquiry” for discourse 
analysis. Form–function correlations define the potential any given form 
has for taking on much more specific meanings in contexts of actual use. 
These more specific meanings we will call “situated meanings.” I assume 
any discourse analysis is aware of (and honors) the general form–function 
correlations that exist in the language being analyzed. In some cases, form–
function analysis is all we may do, and such analyses can be informative and 
important. However, most often the real action of discourse analysis, where it 
really has its biggest bite, is at the level of analyzing situated meanings.
Situated Meaning
A second task that discourse analysis can undertake is what I called above 
the utterance-token or situated meaning task. For simplicity’s sake, I will now 
just call this “the situated meaning task.” When we actually utter or write a 
sentence it has a situated meaning. Situated meanings arise because particular 
language forms take on specific or situated meanings in specific different 
contexts of use.
 Consider the word “coffee” as a very simple example of how situated 
meaning differs from utterance-type meaning. “Coffee” is an arbitrary form 
(other languages use different sounding words for coffee) that correlates 
with meanings having to do with the substance coffee (this is its meaning 
potential). At a more specific level, however, we have to use context to 
 66 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds
determine what the word means in any situated way. In one context, “coffee” 
may mean a brown liquid (“The coffee spilled, go get a mop”); in another one 
it may mean grains of a certain sort (“The coffee spilled, go get a broom”); 
in another it may mean containers (“The coffee spilled, stack it again”); and 
it can mean other things in other contexts, e.g., berries of a certain sort, a 
certain flavor, or a skin color. We can even use the word with a novel situated 
meaning, as in “You give me a coffee high” or “Big Coffee is as bad as Big Oil 
as corporate actors.”
 To see a further example of situated meanings at work, consider sentence 
(1) again (“Though the Whig and Tory parties were both narrowly confined to 
the privileged classes, they represented different factions”). We said above that 
an independent clause represents an assertion (a claim that something is true). 
But this general form–function correlation can mean different specific things in 
actual contexts of use, and can, indeed, even be mitigated or undercut altogether. 
 For example, in one context, say between two like-minded historians, 
the claim that the Whig and Tory parties represented different factions may 
just be taken as a reminder of a “fact” they both agree on. On the other 
hand, between two quite diverse historians, the same claim may be taken 
as a challenge (despite YOUR claim that shared class interests make no real 
difference in political parties, the Whig and Tory parties in seventeenth-
century England were really different). And, of course, on stage as part of 
a drama, the claim about the Whig and Tory parties is not even a “real” 
assertion, but a “pretend” one.
 Furthermore, the words “privileged,” “contending,” and “factions” will 
take on different specific meanings in different contexts. For example, in one 
context, “privileged” might mean “rich,” while in another context it might mean 
“educated” or “cultured” or “politically connected” or “born into a family with 
high status” or some combination of the above or something else altogether.
 To analyze Gagnon’s sentence or his whole text, or any part of it, at the level 
of situated meanings—that is, in order to carry out the situated-meaningtask—
would require a close study of some of the relevant contexts within which that 
text is placed and which it, in turn, helps to create. This might mean inspecting 
the parts of Gagnon’s text that precede or follow a part of the text we want 
to analyze. It might mean inspecting other texts related to Gagnon’s. It might 
mean studying debates among different types of historians and debates about 
educational standards and policy (since Gagnon’s text was meant to argue for a 
view about what history ought to be taught in schools). It might mean studying 
these debates historically across time and in terms of the actual situations 
Gagnon and his text were caught up in (e.g., debates about new school history 
standards in Massachusetts, a state where Gagnon once helped write a version 
of the standards). It might mean many other things, as well. Unfortunately, we 
do not have the space in this book to develop such an analysis here.
 The issue of validity for analyses of situated meaning is quite different than 
the issue of validity for analyses of utterance-type meanings. We saw above 
 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds 67
that the issue of validity for analyses of utterance-type meanings basically 
comes down to choosing and defending a particular grammatical theory 
of how form and function relate in language at the level of utterance-type 
meanings, as well as, of course, offering correct grammatical and semantic 
descriptions of one’s data. On the other hand, the issue of validity for analyses 
of situated meaning is much harder. In fact, it involves a very deep problem, 
the “frame problem.” We will discuss the frame problem below.
The Frame Problem
The frame problem is this: Any aspect of context can affect the meaning 
of an (oral or written) utterance. Context, however, is indefinitely large, 
ranging from local matters like the positioning of bodies and eye gaze, 
through people’s beliefs, to historical, institutional, and cultural settings. No 
matter how much of the context we have considered in offering an interpre-
tation of an utterance, there is always the possibility of considering other 
and additional aspects of the context, and these new considerations may 
change how we interpret the utterance. Where do we cut off consideration 
of context? How can we be sure any interpretation is “right,” if considering 
further aspects of the context might well change that interpretation?
 Let me give an example of a case where changing how much of the context 
of an utterance we consider changes significantly the interpretation we give to 
that utterance. Take a claim like: “Many children die in Africa before they are 
five years old because they get infectious diseases like malaria.” What is the 
appropriate amount of context within which to assess this claim? We could 
consider just medical facts, a narrow context. And in the context the claim 
seems unexceptional.
 But widen the context and consider the wider context described below:
Malaria, an infectious disease, is one of the most severe public health problems 
worldwide. It is a leading cause of death and disease in many developing 
countries, where young children and pregnant women are the groups most 
affected. Worldwide, one death in three is from an infectious or communicable 
disease. However, almost all these deaths occur in the non-industrialized world. 
Health inequality affects not just how people live, but often dictates how and 
at what age they die. (See: http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/impact/index.htm and 
http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/cause.php)
 This context would seem to say that so many children in Africa die early 
not because of infectious diseases but because of poverty and economic 
underdevelopment. While this widening of the context does not necessarily 
render the claim “Many children die in Africa before they are five years old 
because they get infectious diseases like malaria” false, it, at least, suggests 
that a narrow construal of “because” here (limiting it to physical and medical 
causes) effaces the workings of poverty and economics.
 68 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds
 The frame problem is both a problem and a tool. It is a problem because 
our discourse analytic interpretations (just like people’s everyday interpreta-
tions of language) are always vulnerable to changing as we widen the context 
within which we interpret a piece of language. It is a tool because we can use 
it—widening the context—to see what information and values are being left 
unsaid or effaced in a piece of language.
 The frame problem, of course, raises problems about validity for discourse 
analysis. We cannot really argue an analysis is valid unless we keep widening the 
context in which we consider a piece of language until the widening appears to 
make no difference to our interpretation. At that point, we can stop and make 
our claims (open, of course, to later falsification as in all empirical inquiry).
Critical Discourse Analysis
Some forms of discourse analysis add a third task to the two (the utterance-
type meaning task and the situated meaning task) discussed so far. They study, 
as well, the ways in which either or both of language–form correlations at the 
utterance-type level (task 1) and situated meanings (task 2) are associated 
with social practices (task 3). While non-critical approaches can and do, 
indeed, study social practices, critical approaches and non-critical ones take 
a different approach to social practices and how to study them. Non-critical 
approaches tend to treat social practices solely in terms of patterns of social 
interaction (e.g., how people use language to “pull off” a job interview). 
 Thus, consider again the sentence from Gagnon we discussed above:
1. Though the Whig and Tory parties were both narrowly confined to the privi-
leged classes, they represented different factions and tendencies
 A non-critical form of discourse analysis could well point out the fact that 
using “Though the Whig and Tory parties were both narrowly confined to the 
privileged classes” as a dependent (and, thus, assumed and unasserted) clause 
sets up a social relationship with the reader in terms of which the reader 
should accept, as given and assumed, that distinctions of wealth in a society 
are less central to the development of democracy than political differences 
within elites in the society (which the main asserted clause is about). 
 Critical approaches, however, go further and treat social practices, not 
just in terms of social relationships, but, also, in terms of their implications 
for things like status, solidarity, the distribution of social goods, and power 
(e.g., how language in a job interview functions as a gate-keeping device 
allowing some sorts of people access and denying it to others). In fact, critical 
discourse analysis argues that language-in-use is always part and parcel of, 
and partially constitutive of, specific social practices and that social practices 
always have implications for inherently political things like status, solidarity, 
the distribution of social goods, and power.
 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds 69
 So the issue becomes this: Is it enough to leave the analysis of the social at 
the level of how talk and texts function in social interactions or do we need 
to go further and consider, as well, how talk and text function politically in 
social interactions? Does the latter task render discourse analysis—and, thus 
perforce, critical discourse analysis—“unscientific” or “unacademic,” a mere 
matter of “advocacy”?
 Consider sentence (1) again. There are historians who think that class 
conflict—conflict between haves and have nots—drives history. They would say 
that the fact that the Whig and Tory parties were narrowly confined to the privi-
leged classes is a key fact about the political situation of seventeenth-century 
England (though Gagnonplaces it in a subordinate clause). This fact, they will 
say, drove change because it led to the non-elites fighting for representation. 
 What Gagnon has done is put what these historians see as the key point in 
a subordinate clause and treated it as assumed and backgrounded information 
that, while important, does not challenge his main claim that the Whig and 
Tory parties represented different factions (and, thus, for Gagnon were in the 
forefront of the development of democracy in Western society). His formu-
lation is a move not only in an academic argument with such historians but 
in political debates about what and how history ought to be taught in school. 
 This is an essential aspect to understanding not just what Gagnon is 
saying, but what he is trying to do. It moves us beyond social interactions 
between writer and reader and to value-laden positions that are “political.” 
Claims, like Gagnon’s, do not come out of nowhere. They are part of ongoing 
dialogue or debate and are understood within that dialogue or debate. Thus, 
a full discourse must discuss such matters and must, in that sense, be critical. 
When we discussed the “building tasks” in Chapter 2, I offered yet another, 
more general, reason why all language use is “political” and, thus, why 
discourse analysis ought to be critical. I defined what I meant by “politics” 
as contestation over “the distribution of social goods” and argued that all 
language use involves perspectives on the distribution of social goods.
Figured Worlds
Is the Pope a bachelor? Though the Pope is an unmarried man—and 
“bachelor” as a word is defined as “an unmarried man”—we are reluctant to 
call the Pope a bachelor. Why? The reason is that we do not use words just 
based on their definitions or what we called earlier their “general meanings.” 
We use words based, as well, on stories, theories, or models in our minds 
about what is “normal” or “typical.” 
 It is typical in our world that men marry women. A man who is somewhat 
past the typical age when people marry we call a “bachelor,” assuming he is 
open to marriage but has either chosen to wait or has not found the “right” 
person. The Pope is both well past the normal age for marriage and has vowed 
never to marry. He just does not fit the typical story in our heads.
 70 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds
 We use words based on such typical stories unless something in the 
context makes us think the situation is not typical. If the issue of gay marriage 
or the chauvinism of calling men “bachelors” and women “spinsters” comes 
up, then we have to think more overtly about matters and abandon, if only 
for the time, our typical picture. Indeed, things can change in society enough 
that what counts as a typical story changes or becomes contested. People 
may even stop using words like “bachelor” based on the typical story and 
form a new typical story—and, thus, start calling marriage-eligible women 
“bachelors” as well.
 We use such typical pictures so that we can go on about the business of 
communicating, acting, and living without having to consciously think about 
everything—all the possible details and exceptions—all the time. This is good 
for getting things done, but sometimes bad in the ways in which such typical 
stories can marginalize people and things that are not taken as “normal” or 
“typical” in the story.
 What counts as a typical story for people differs by their social and culture 
groups. For example, some parents confronted by a demanding two-year-old 
who angrily refuses to go to bed take the child’s behavior as a sign of growth 
towards autonomy because they accept a typical story like this: Children are 
born dependent on their parents and then grow towards individual autonomy 
or independence. On their way to autonomy, they act out, demanding 
independence, when they may not yet be ready for it, but this is still a sign 
of development and growth. Other parents confronted by the same behavior 
take the behavior as a sign of the child’s willfulness because they accept a 
typical story like this: Children are born selfish and need to be taught to think 
of others and collaborate with the family rather than demand their own way. 
 It is, perhaps, not surprising that this latter typical story is more common 
among working-class families where mutual support among family and friends 
is important. The former story is more common among middle- and upper-
middle-class families with many more financial resources where people are 
expected to grow into adults who have the resources to go it more on their own.
 Such typical stories are not “right” or “wrong.” For example, children 
are, of course, born dependent on their parents. But are children primarily 
inherently selfish and in need of being taught how to cooperate with others 
or are they inherently reliant on caregivers and in need of learning to be 
independent? The different stories we discussed are probably both true in 
some sense, but one or the other can be stressed and form the main parenting 
style in the home. They are simplified theories of the world that are meant 
to help people go on about the business of life when one is not allowed the 
time to think through and research everything before acting. Even theories 
in science are simplified views of the world meant to help scientists cope, 
without having to deal with the full complexity of the world all at once.
 These typical stories have been given many different names. They have 
been called “folk theories,” “frames,” “scenarios,” “scripts,” “mental models,” 
 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds 71
“cultural models,” “Discourse models,” and “figured worlds” (and each of 
these terms has its own nuances). Such typical stories are stored in our heads 
(and we will see in a moment that they are not always only in our heads) in 
the form of images, metaphors, and narratives.
 We will use the term “figured world” here for these typical stories. The term 
“figured world” has been defined as follows:
A socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular 
characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and 
particular outcomes are valued over others. Each is a simplified world populated 
by a set of agents who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts or changes of 
state as moved by a specific set of forces. (Holland et al., 1998, p. 52)
 A figured world is a picture of a simplified world that captures what is 
taken to be typical or normal. What is taken to be typical or normal, of 
course, varies by context and by people’s social and cultural group (as we saw 
in the example of acting out two-year-olds above). For example, if I ask you 
to imagine a suburban bedroom you will populate the room with people and 
things in a quite different way than if I ask you to imagine a bedroom in a 
college dorm. You base what you take to be typical on your experiences, and 
since people’s experiences vary in terms of their social and cultural groups, 
people vary in what they take to be typical. And, again, as society changes 
what people take as typical can and does change. Figured worlds are not 
static.
 To give another example, consider the figured world (or typical story) 
that might arise in someone’s mind if they think about an elementary school 
classroom: Typical participants include one teacher (a female) and a group 
of kids of roughly the same age and some support staff, including teachers 
who help kids with special problems (e.g., learning disabilities, reading 
problems, or who are learning English as a second language), sometimes by 
pulling them out of the classroom. The kids are sitting in desks in rows facing 
the teacher, who is doing most of the talking and sometimes asks the kids 
questions to which she knows the answers. There are activities like filling out 
sheets of paper with math problems on them. There are regulartests, some of 
them state standardized tests. There is an institution surrounding the teacher 
that includes a principal and other teachers as well as curriculum directors 
and mandates from officials. Parents are quasi “outsiders” to this institution. 
There are labels for individual kids, labels such as “SPED” (special education), 
“LD” (learning disabled), and “ESL” (English as a Second Language).
 This figured world—with its typical participants, activities, forms of 
language, and object and environments—is, of course, realized in many 
actual classrooms. However, there are many exceptions, as well, but they do 
not normally come to mind when we think and talk about schools. In fact, 
every aspect of this figured world is heavily contested in one or more current 
 72 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds
school-reform efforts (e.g., age grading, lots of testing, skill sheets, too much 
teacher talk, children in rows, etc.). The taken-for-granted nature of the 
figured world, however, often stands in the way of change. Reforms just do 
not seem “normal” or “right” or “the way things should be.” For example, 
today it is not uncommon that young children can teach adults things about 
digital technology, but the child teaching and the teacher learning violates our 
typical story. It also violates the values and structures of authority this typical 
story incorporates.
 I have said that these typical stories—what we are calling figured worlds—
are in our heads. But that is not strictly true. Often they are partly in our heads 
and partly out in the world in books and other media and in other people’s 
heads, people we can talk to. The figured world in which children are born 
dependent and development is progress towards individual autonomy and 
independence as adults who can manage their own lives based on their own 
resources is a model that is found in lots of child-raising self-help books and 
in the talk and actions of many parents who are professionals (e.g., doctors, 
lawyers, professors, executives, and so forth) with whom we can interact if 
we live in the right neighborhood. 
 Figured worlds give us yet another tool for discourse analysis. For any 
communication, we want to ask what typical stories or figured worlds the 
words and phrases of the communication are assuming and inviting listeners 
to assume. What participants, activities, ways of interacting, forms of 
language, people, objects, environments, and institutions, as well as values, 
are in these figured worlds?
Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured 
Worlds are Tools of Inquiry
In this chapter, I have once again treated the terms “form–function correla-
tions,” “situated meaning,” and “figured worlds” realistically. That is, I have 
spoken about them as things that exist in the mind and in the world. And, 
indeed, this is, I believe, both true and the easiest way to grasp what they 
mean and how and why they are significant for discourse analysis.
 But it is important to realize that, in the end, these terms are ultimately our 
ways as theoreticians and analysts of talking about and, thus, constructing 
and construing the world. And it is in this guise that I am primarily interested 
in them. They are “tools of inquiry.” I will discuss figured worlds as tools of 
inquiry more thoroughly in the next chapter. Here I want to sketch out what 
I mean by “situated meaning” as a tool of inquiry.
 At the outset of this chapter, I discussed form–function analysis, that is, 
general pairing of language forms with certain rather general functions they 
can carry out. This sort of analysis defines the potential any given form has for 
taking on much more specific meanings in contexts of actual use. These more 
 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds 73
specific meanings we have called “situated meanings.” I assume any discourse 
analysis is aware of (and honors) the general form–function correlations that 
exist in the language being analyzed. In some cases, form–function analysis is 
all we may do and such analyses can be informative and important. However, 
most often the real action of discourse analysis, where it really has its biggest 
bite, is at the level of analyzing situated meanings.
 “Situated meaning” is a “thinking device” that guides us to ask certain 
sorts of questions. Faced with a piece of oral or written language, we consider 
a certain key word or a family of key words, that is, words we hypothesize are 
important to understanding the language we wish to analyze. We consider, as 
well, all that we can learn about the context that this language is both used 
in and helps to create or construe in a certain way. We then ask the following 
sorts of questions: 
A. What situated meaning or meanings for a given word or phrase is it reasonable to 
attribute to their “author,” considering the point of view of the Discourse in which 
words were used (e.g., the Discourse of biology or the very different Discourse of 
fundamentalist creationism)? 
B. What situated meaning or meanings for a given word or phrase is it reasonable 
to attribute to those who are listening to or reading these words or phrases, again 
considering the Discourse in which these words are used?
C. What situated meaning or meanings for a word or phrase is it reasonable to 
attribute to those who are listening to or reading these words or phrases, from the 
point of view of other Discourses than the one in which the words were uttered or 
written? These other Discourses might be ones that bring different values, norms, 
perspectives, and assumptions to the situation. For example, what sorts of situated 
meanings might a fundamentalist creationist give to a text in biology or a Native 
American to an American history text if they chose to interpret the text from the 
point of view of their own Discourse and not the one from which the text had 
originally been produced?
D. What situated meaning or meanings is it reasonable, from the point of view of 
the Discourse in which these words were used or of other Discourses, to assume 
are potentially attributable to these words by interpreters, whether or not we have 
evidence anyone actually activated that potential in the current case?
 Our answers to these questions are always tentative. They are always open 
to revision as we learn more about the context. And, we can nearly always 
learn more about the material, social, cultural, and historical contexts in 
which the words were uttered or written. However, at some point, what we 
learn may well cease to change our answers to these sorts of questions in any 
very substantive way. 
 Our tentative answers are testable in a variety of different ways, including 
(but not exhausted by) asking actual and possible producers and receivers 
what they think (remembering that many, but not all, aspects of situated 
meanings and Discourse models are unconscious); looking at the verbal and 
non-verbal effects of the language in the present and future (e.g., how people 
 74 Form–Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds
react and respond); looking at how the past led up to these words and deeds; 
looking at similar and contrasting uses of language; and appealing to a wide 
and diverse array of linguistic and contextual factors, as well as different tools 
of inquiry, at different levels, that we hope converge on the same answer. 
These sorts of concerns lead us to issues about validity, issues which I will 
take up in Chapter 8 after I have introduced a variety of other tools of inquiry.
Readings
(Note: Readings relevant to cultural models and figured worlds are cited in 
the Readings section at the end of the next chapter, a chapter devoted to 
figured worlds.)
Duranti, A. (1992). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[The best introduction to linguistic anthropology]
Duranti, A. & Goodwin, C., Eds. (1992). Rethinking context: Languageas an interactive 
phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A set of good papers on the 
role of context in interpretation]
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. [Fairclough’s approach 
to critical discourse analysis is just called “CDA” and is the best-known such 
approach]
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: 
Routledge.
Gagnon, P. (1987). Democracy’s untold story: What world history textbooks neglect. 
Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. [I use this book for data, since 
it is a good example of an historian writing with a clear purpose to change public 
policy]
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[A classic on analyzing language in context]
Gumperz, J. J. & Levinson, S. C., Eds. (1996). Rethinking linguistic relativity. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Good papers on language and culture]
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar. Second Edition. 
London: Edward Arnold. [The best source for reflecting on form–function correla-
tions in language]
Kress, G. (1985). Linguistic processes in sociocultural practice. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press. [A masterful book on language as practice from a social semiotic perspective]
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A very 
good book on pragmatics—a close relative of discourse analysis—with a good 
discussion of form–function correlations and type-utterance and token-utterance 
meanings]
Rogers, R., Ed. (2004). An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education. 
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [A good collection of papers on critical discourse 
analysis and its applications to education]
CHAPTER SIX
More on Figured Worlds
■■ Figured Worlds  76
■■ Simulations in the Mind  78
■■ All Meaning is Local  82
■■ Figured Worlds in Action: Middle-Class Parenting  84
■■ Figured Worlds in Conflict  88
■■ Different Sorts and Uses of Figured Worlds  90
■■ Figured Worlds Can Be Partial and Inconsistent  91
■■ Figured Worlds as Tools of Inquiry  95
 76 More on Figured Worlds
Figured Worlds
This chapter will focus exclusively on figured worlds, a concept we intro-
duced in the last chapter. The term “figured world” is a name for something 
that people have called by many different names. Cultural model, discourse 
model, Discourse model, folk theory, as well as certain uses of schema, frame, 
and script, are a few of the names that have been used, each with somewhat 
different meanings. Figured worlds are simplified, often unconscious, and 
taken-for-granted theories or stories about how the world works that we use 
to get on efficiently with our daily lives. We learn them from experiences we 
have had, but, crucially, as these experiences are guided, shaped, and normed 
by the social and cultural groups to which we belong. From such experiences 
we infer what is “normal” or “typical” (e.g., what a “normal” man or child 
or policeman looks and acts like; what a “normal” marriage is like; what a 
“normal” classroom looks and acts like) and tend to act on these assumptions 
unless something clearly tells us that we are facing an exception.
 Why use the term “figured worlds”? In the first edition of this book I used the 
term “cultural model.” In the second edition I used the term “Discourse model.” 
The term “figured world” has the advantage of stressing that what we are talking 
about here is ways in which people picture or construe aspects of the world in 
their heads, the ways they have of looking at aspects of the world. We humans 
store these figured worlds in our heads in terms of stories, ideas, and images. We 
build little worlds, models, simulations—whatever term we want to use—in our 
heads in terms of which we seek to understand and act in the real world. When 
I use the term “figured world” in this chapter, you can substitute, as well, terms 
like “model,” “theory,” “story,” and “way of looking at some aspect of the world.”
 Figured worlds are an important tool of inquiry because they mediate 
between the “micro” (small) level of interaction and the “macro” (large) 
level of institutions. They mediate between the local interactional work we 
humans do in carrying out the seven building tasks discussed in Chapter 2 
and Discourses as they operate to create the complex patterns of institutions 
and cultures across societies and history. 
 For example, when I was growing up, the Discourse of heterosexual 
romance (i.e., enacting and being recognized as an acceptable “date” and 
potential partner) and actual dating practices were mediated by a bevy of 
figured worlds, one of which held that women brought “beauty” as their 
prime asset to a relationship and men brought “intelligence” and potential 
career success as their prime asset. This model has changed a good bit, and, 
so, too, then, have actual dating practices.
 The role of figured worlds was first made clear in a classic paper by 
the linguist Charles Fillmore (1975), who used the term “frame” instead 
of “figured world.” Fillmore used a deceptively simple example: the word 
“bachelor.” All of us think we know what the word “bachelor” means: like 
dictionaries, we all think it means “an unmarried man.”
 More on Figured Worlds 77
 Fillmore, however, asked questions like: Is the Pope a bachelor? Is a thrice-
divorced man a bachelor? Is a young man who has been in an irreversible 
coma since childhood a bachelor? What about a eunuch? A committed gay 
man? An elderly senile gentleman who has never been married? The answer 
to all these questions is either “no” or “I’m not sure” (as I have discovered 
by asking a variety of people). Why? After all, all these people are unmarried 
men. 
 The reason why the answer to these questions is “no,” despite the fact 
that they all involve cases of clearly unmarried males, is that we actually 
use the word “bachelor” (and any other word) in relation to a largely taken-
for-granted “theory,” what, in the last chapter, I called a “figured world.” 
One way to think about figured worlds is as images or storylines or descrip-
tions of simplified worlds in which prototypical events unfold. They are our 
“first thoughts” or taken-for-granted assumptions about what is “typical” or 
“normal.” We defined them in the last chapter as:
A socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular 
characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and 
particular outcomes are valued over others. Each is a simplified world populated 
by a set of agents who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts or changes of 
state as moved by a specific set of forces. (Holland et al., 1998, p. 52)
 We will see below that when figured worlds are brought to our attention, 
we can often acknowledge they are really simplifications about the world, 
simplifications which leave out many complexities. But, then, all theories, 
even theories in science, are simplifications useful for some purposes and not 
others. Unfortunately, the simplifications in figured worlds can do harm by 
implanting in thought and action unfair, dismissive, or derogatory assump-
tions about other people.
 The most commonly used figured world for the word “bachelor” is (or 
used to be) something like the following by Fillmore (1975): 
Men marry women at a certain age; marriages last for life; and in such a world, a 
bachelor is a man who stays unmarried beyond the usual age, thereby becoming 
eminently marriageable. We know that this simplified world is not always true, but 
it is the one against which we use the word “bachelor,” that is, make choices about 
what other words are excluded as applicable or not, and make assumptions about 
what the relevant context is in a given caseof using the word. Thus, the Pope is 
not a bachelor because he just isn’t in this simplified world, being someone who 
has vowed not to marry at any age. Nor are gay men, since they have chosen not 
to marry women.
 Figured worlds often involve us in exclusions that are not at first obvious 
and which we are often unaware of making. In the case of “bachelor” we are 
actually excluding people like gay individuals and priests as “normal” men, 
 78 More on Figured Worlds
and assuming that men come in two “normal” types: those who get married 
early and those who get married late. This assumption, of course, marginalizes 
people who do not want to get married or do not want to marry members of 
the opposite sex. It is part of the function of figured worlds, in fact, to set up 
what count as central, typical cases, and what count as marginal, non-typical 
cases. 
 There is, of course, another exclusion that is made via the figured world 
for “bachelor.” If men become “eminently marriageable” when they stay 
unmarried beyond the usual age, then this can only be because we have 
assumed that after that age there is a shortage of “desirable” men and a 
surplus of women who want them, women who, thus, aren’t “eminently 
marriageable,” or, at least, not as “eminently marriageable” as the men. 
Hence, we get the most common figured world associated with “spinster.”
 Fillmore’s example raises another important point that further shows up 
the connection between figured worlds and “politics.” Thanks to feminism, 
lots of people have become consciously aware of the figured world behind 
the word “bachelor.” Many have come to reject it, thereby either dropping 
the word or changing its meaning. For example, many people now use the 
word “bachelor” for unmarried women, thus giving the word new meanings 
and applying it against a new figured world. Other people use a word like 
“spinster” as a badge of honor and respect, once again creating new meanings 
and figured worlds.
 The “bite” of Fillmore’s example is this: if any word in English seems to 
have a clear “definition,” it is a word like “bachelor.” But this word is not 
used in terms of a definition, but rather against a set of social and Discourse 
assumptions that constitute a figured world. If this is true of a word like 
“bachelor,” how much more likely is it to be true of words like “democracy,” 
“justice,” “intelligent,” or “literate,” for instance?
Simulations in the Mind
The “bachelor” example is, of course, too simple. There are lots of different 
sorts of figured worlds and lots of different ways to think and talk about them. 
Figured worlds are rooted in our actual experiences in the world, but, rather 
like movies, those experiences have been edited to capture what is taken to 
be essential or typical. In fact, figured worlds are linked to simulations we run 
in our minds, simulations that help us to think about things and to prepare 
ourselves for action in the world. Let me say how this works.
 We have experiences in the world, including things we have experienced 
only in the media. Take as an example your experiences of weddings. These 
experiences are raw materials that our minds can work on—can seek to find 
order and pattern in—in order to think about and prepare actions in regard to 
future weddings and related events. Based on these experiences, we can build 
a simulation of a wedding in our mind. We can move around as a character in 
 More on Figured Worlds 79
the simulation as ourselves, imaging our role in the wedding, or we can “play” 
other characters at the wedding (e.g., the minister), imaging what it is like to 
be that person.
 Simulations are common in video games and in science today. Games like 
SimCity, The Sims, and Spore allow players to build simulations (virtual worlds) 
of aspects of cities, families, and worlds respectively. Scientists use computers 
to build simulations that model how things like weather patterns, chemicals 
inside cells, or traffic patterns work. The scientist can build a simulation of 
cars moving at various speeds and braking for other cars changing lanes on 
a crowded freeway, let the simulation run for a certain amount of time, and 
watch what happens to traffic flow under certain conditions. The scientist can 
then check to see if similar things happen in the real world when conditions 
are like those set up in the simulation. In turn, the scientist can change some 
of the variables (e.g., the speed of the cars, the number of cars, the number 
changing lanes at any one time, etc.) and see what then happens. Of course, 
there are many things—like warfare and natural disasters—that are much 
safer to study via simulations on a computer than they are to study in real life.
 We humans can build such simulations in our minds. We can simulate 
a typical wedding, job interview, or confrontation with the boss, or we can 
imagine an untypical one, like a wedding between two men, a job interview 
in which the interviewer begs us to take the job, or a confrontation with the 
boss in which the boss admits he’s wrong. In this respect, our heads are like 
a video game or a computer simulation, though, in fact, they are much more 
powerful and flexible than either games or computers. We build simulations 
both to help us understand what we are currently seeing, hearing, or reading 
and to prepare us for action in the world (e.g., the coming battle with the 
boss).
 The simulations we build in our heads of things like weddings are not 
“neutral.” Rather, the simulation is meant to take a perspective on weddings. It 
foregrounds certain aspects of weddings that we take as important or salient. 
It backgrounds other elements that we think are less important or less salient. 
It leaves some things out altogether. This is just like the scientist’s simulation 
of traffic flow on the computer. Here, too, certain variables (e.g., number of 
cars) are foregrounded as central, others are included in the simulation, but 
backgrounded as less important (e.g., size of each car), and others still are left 
out altogether (e.g., color of the cars).
 However, we do not build just one wedding simulation, store it away once-
and-for-all in our minds, and apply it any time the word “wedding” comes 
up or any time we have to prepare for attending a wedding. No, what we do, 
rather, is build different simulations on the spot for different specific contexts 
we are in. In a given situation or conversation involving weddings, we build 
a simulation that fits that context and helps us to make sense of it. Our 
simulations are special-built to help us make sense of the specific situations 
we are in, conversations we are having, or texts we are reading. We imagine 
 80 More on Figured Worlds
what might happen, based on what we have experienced in the past and what 
we have seen so far in the present, in order to understand what is going on, 
predict what might happen, and prepare for actions and decisions.
 For example, in one case, we might build a simulation that foregrounds 
weddings as fun, blissful, and full of potential for a long and happy future 
(perhaps, we have just heard “I’m so happy” from the new bride). In another 
case, we might build a simulation that foregrounds weddings as complex, 
stressful, and full of potential for problematic futures (perhaps, we have just 
heard “I’m so scared” from the new bride). We have had experiences that 
allow us to build both types of simulations and, indeed, yet others.
 As I said, one reason we build our simulations is to help us make sense 
of things. Sometimes this does not work all that well. For example, every 
time I see or hear about the sport of cricket, I build simulations based on my 
experiences of baseball. That is, I use my images and stories of baseball to try 
to make sense of cricket. I build different simulations on different occasions, 
since they never seem to work well to make really good sense of what I am 
seeing or hearing. If I ever got deeperand better experiences of cricket, I 
could make better simulations. Furthermore, I could then use those experi-
ences, if I had enough of them, to build more direct simulations of cricket 
worlds, ones less influenced by baseball. I might even be able to use these to 
understand baseball in a new way by comparing it to some specific cricket 
simulations.
 We also build our simulations to help us prepare for action in the world. 
We can act in the simulation and test out what consequences follow, before we 
act in the real world. We can role-play another person in the simulation and 
try to see what motivates their actions or might follow from them before we 
respond to them in the real world. In fact, it is this ability to think—really to 
imagine—before we act that is a large part of what makes us humans “smart.”
 Thanks to the fact that our experiences in the world are shared with others 
who are members of the same social and cultural groups as ourselves, our 
simulations of things like weddings—our expectations for what will happen 
and not happen at weddings—come to overlap with other people’s simula-
tions. They don’t need to overlap perfectly, just enough for us to be able to 
communicate and act together. 
 Because we do share ways of looking at things with other members of our 
various social and cultural groups, we all have the capacity to form proto-
typical simulations. Prototypical simulations are what support figured worlds. 
Prototypical simulations are the sorts of simulations you will run in your 
head of something like weddings, marriages, committee meetings, romance, 
and families when you take the situation to be “typical.” Of course, what is 
taken as “typical” differs across different social and cultural groups of people. 
Your figured world of weddings, for instance, is the sort of simulation you will 
run (imagine) when you imagine what you (and your social group) take to 
be “typical” weddings. This is your prototypical simulation of a wedding (in 
 More on Figured Worlds 81
reality, you may have a related set of simulations that together capture what 
you take to be typical of weddings).
 If I tell you to imagine a wedding and give you no more context than that, 
what you will run in your mind is your prototypical simulation and this is one 
that you share with other people who think about wedding in similar ways to 
you—people who have had lots of the same sorts of experiences of weddings 
that you have had. If I give you more context, say I tell you this is a wedding 
between two men, then you will realize your prototypical wedding simulation 
doesn’t really work here, in this specific case—this isn’t a “typical” case—and 
you may change your simulation (expectations) accordingly, though keeping 
as much of the prototypical simulation as you can. You may run a special-
case simulation for a wedding between two men, keeping some aspects of the 
prototypical simulation (e.g., vows), dropping others (e.g., a wedding dress), 
and adding new elements that don’t appear in the prototypical case (e.g., two 
best men, instead of a best man and a best woman). Of course, you might also 
stick with your prototypical simulation and refuse to see and call what the 
two males are doing a “wedding.”
 Thus, we can run (think of) prototypical simulations of things like 
weddings in our heads. And, we can adapt them, more or less radically, for 
specific circumstances. This contrast between prototypical simulations and 
more special-case simulations is important. Since we take the prototype 
simulations to capture what is “typical,” we often use these prototypes to 
judge features of our more special-purpose simulations, the ones adjusted 
for special cases like men marrying men, as “non-normal” or “deviant” in 
some sense. This is a danger. We can often thereby translate “difference” 
into “deviance” by moving from “typical” (which we too often take to mean 
“normal,” “acceptable,” and “right”) to “less typical” (which we then take to 
mean “non-normal,” “not acceptable,” and “not right”).
 Figured worlds are linked to simulations in our minds. Simulations are the 
way the mind handles figured worlds. We build worlds in our minds (much as 
video-game designers build worlds into their games). But these figured worlds 
are not just mental. They exist in books and other media, in knowledge we 
can gain from what other people say and do, and in what we can infer from 
various social practices around us. They exist, as well, in the metaphors we 
use. In many cases, individuals do not know all the elements of a figured 
world, but get parts of it from books, media, or other people as they need to 
know more. This is so because we humans are capable of gaining experiences 
vicariously from texts, media, and other people’s stories.
 For example, I can simulate in my mind a typical “military base,” but 
I would have to trust to various media representations to fill it out more, 
should I need to, since I have not had near enough actual experiences of my 
own of such bases. Without such supplementation, I’m not sure I could tell 
the difference between a typical base and a non-typical one. I would need 
such supplementation to prepare for thought and action in regard to visiting 
 82 More on Figured Worlds
such a base (let alone living on one). Many poor families feel this way in 
regard to schools and visits to teachers. Of course, sometimes we are aware 
that the simulations we can build are in need of such supplementation and 
sometimes we are not. Of course, there is a danger that we often supplement 
the aspects of figured worlds we can build on our own with texts, media, and 
talk that just reinforce what we already believe and value by engaging only 
with texts, media, and talk from sources we “trust” in the sense that they are 
“like us” socially, religiously, or culturally and don’t challenge us.
All Meaning is Local
It is difficult to appreciate the importance and pervasiveness of figured 
worlds, or to understand how they work, if we stick only to examples from 
cultures close to our own. So let me give an example of figured worlds at work 
adapted from William Hanks’s excellent book, Language and Communicative 
Practices (1996). This example will also let us see that figured worlds are at 
work in even the “simplest” cases of communication and in regard to even 
the simplest words.
 When we watch language-in-action in a culture quite different from our 
own, even simple interactions can be inexplicable, thanks to the fact that we 
do not know many of the figured worlds at play. This means that even if we 
can figure out the situated meanings of some words, we cannot see any sense 
to why these situated meanings have arisen. So let’s move, with Hanks, to 
Yucatan, Mexico.
 In a small town in Yucatan, a Mayan Shaman named “Don Chabo” is sharing 
a meal with his daughter-in-law, Margot, and a visiting anthropologist. They 
are all in Margot’s house. A young man, named “Yuum,” approaches from the 
outside, and, standing at the window, asks: “Is Don Chabo seated?” Margot 
replies: “Go over there. He’s drinking. Go over there inside.” These are about 
as simple as sentences get.
 And yet the meaning of these sentences is not so straightforward after 
all. For example, the people seated around the table are having a meal, so 
why does Margot say that Don Chabo is “drinking”? Furthermore, Margot’s 
response implies that Don Chabo is “drinking,” despite the fact that he was, at 
the moment, gazing off into space with a roll in his hand. Indeed, in Mayan, 
it would have been equally true here to say Don Chabo was “drinking” had 
he been altogether done with (eating) his meal. 
 Margot’s response implies, as well, that Don Chabo was “seated.” Yet, it 
turns out, it would have been equally true to say he was “seated” had he been 
standing or even off somewhere else, even taking a bath in his own home. 
 Or, to take one final example, Margot uses the Mayan word for “there” 
that means“maximally distant from the speaker,” the same word people 
in Yucatan use for relatives who live outside Yucatan, in other states in the 
Mexican republic. She does this despite the fact that she is telling Yuum to go 
 More on Figured Worlds 83
into her father-in-law’s house, not 10 meters away from hers and within the 
same compound as her house.
 How can it be that people can be “drinking” when they are eating or doing 
nothing at all? That they are “seated” when they are standing or taking a bath? 
That they are far distant from something 10 meters away? 
 Things work this way because Mayans (these Mayans, in any case), 
though they almost always take food with drink and vice versa, use the words 
“drink” and “eat” against a figured world of meals in terms of which their 
morning and evening meals are “drinking” and their larger main meal in the 
midafternoon is “eating.” Furthermore, to these Mayans, as long as the social 
engagement of mealtime is still going on, regardless of whether the “meal” 
itself is finished or not, a person is still “drinking” or “eating.” 
 Many Mayans live in walled compounds that contain several houses. 
Their figured worlds for house and home are, thus, rather different from 
(some of) ours. They use the word “seated” to mean that one is “at home” 
and available, regardless of where one is in the compound. Being “available” 
has, in addition, a special meaning for Shamans, since, of course, the whole 
business of Shamans brings to the fore a distinctive set of figured worlds. To 
ask whether a Shaman is “available” is to use this word against these figured 
worlds and is to ask, in part, whether he is available to engage in counseling. 
 Finally, Mayans have their own figured worlds, as all of us do, of how 
physical and social space work and are related. Margot is excluded from her 
father-in-law’s house, unless she has a specific reason to be there, for social 
reasons having to do with Mayan Discourse figured worlds of social relation-
ships and spaces within homes. Thus, she uses the word for “far distant” due 
to social, rather than physical, distance. 
 In this brief example, I have, in fact, given you very little of what you really 
need to know to fully understand these simple sentences (for example, why 
does Margot, rather than Don Chabo, respond?). To really understand them, 
even to understand just their “literal meaning,” one needs to understand how 
social hierarchies, gender, meals, social engagements, Shamanism, and a great 
deal more, work day-to-day in local settings among (certain of the) Mayans. 
 Hanks devotes dozens of pages of dense, scholarly prose to explicating 
what these sentences mean, not at any deep symbolic or thematic level, just 
at the “literal” level. He points out that when a husband asks his wife, early 
in the morning, in English, “D’the paper come today, sweetheart?” and she 
answers “It’s right on the table,” the situation is no less strange, complex, and 
local, however invisible all this complexity (our own) may be to us. 
 The moral that Hanks draws from even so simple sentences as these is 
this: meaning, even literal meaning, is wedded to local, “on site,” social, and 
Discourse practices. To put the matter another way: meaning is not general and 
abstract, not something that resides alone in dictionaries, or even in general 
symbolic representations inside people’s heads. Rather, it is situated in specific 
social and Discourse practices, and is, in fact, continually transformed in 
 84 More on Figured Worlds
those practices. Or to put the matter in the terms we introduced in the last 
chapter: meaning is a matter of situated meanings, customized in, to, and for 
context, used always against a rich store of Discourse knowledge (figured 
worlds and the adaptations we make to them when our prototypical cases do 
not work) that are themselves “activated” in, for, and by contexts.
 This is, of course, as true of English as it is of Mayan, but, since we know 
our own local practices so thoroughly and unreflectively, the situated and local 
nature of meaning is largely invisible to us. It is easy for us to miss the specif-
icity and localness of our own practices and think we have general, abstract, 
even universal meanings. We come to think, when we have confronted no 
other languages, that “sitting” is just sitting, “drinking” is just drinking, “over 
there” is just over there. In fact, the situated, social, and Discourse nature of 
meaning often becomes visible to us only when we confront language-at-work 
in languages and cultures far distant from our own.
Figured Worlds in Action: Middle-Class Parenting
I want to briefly discuss two now classic examples from the literature on 
figured worlds (in this research the term “cultural model” was used). Both 
examples demonstrate the connection between figured worlds and social class, 
though in different ways. Thus, too, these examples, and others that follow 
below from my own research, begin our discussion of the social, Discourse, 
and political issues that are implicated in the study of figured worlds. 
 The first example is a study of middle-class parents in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, in the United States from the work of Harkness, Super, and 
Keefer (1992). When these parents talked about their children, two closely 
related and tightly integrated figured worlds were highly salient. One was 
tied to the notion of “stages of development” through which children pass 
(we might call it the “stage model”). The other was tied to the notion of the 
child’s growing desire for “independence” as the central theme giving point 
and direction to these stages (we might call it the “independence model”). 
 For example, consider how one mother talked about her son David:
he’s very definitely been in a stage, for the last three or four months, of wanting to 
help, everything I do, he wants to help . . . And now, I would say in the last month, 
the intensity of wanting to do everything himself is . . . we’re really into that stage 
. . . I suppose they’re all together . . . ya, I suppose they’re two parts of the same 
thing. Independence, reaching out for independence. Anything he wants to do for 
himself, which is just about everything, that I move in and do for him, will result 
in a real tantrum. (pp. 165–166)
 David’s mother later gave as an example of his “wanting to do” things for 
himself: an episode where she had opened the car door for him when he was 
having a hard time getting out of the car: “He was very upset, so we had to 
 More on Figured Worlds 85
go back and . . . close the door” (p. 166). She also attributed David’s recent 
dislike of being dressed or diapered to his growing sense of independence: 
“he’s getting to the point where it’s insulting, and he doesn’t want to be put 
on his back to have his diaper changed.”
 However, in the same interview, David’s mother also mentioned another 
behavior pattern. To get David to sleep, she straps him into his car seat and 
pretends to be taking him for a drive. He almost immediately falls asleep, and 
then she returns home, leaving him in the car, with a blanket, to take a nap: 
“But he goes to sleep so peacefully, without any struggle, usually” (p. 167). 
 Though this latter pattern is a repeated daily routine, nonetheless, David’s 
mother does not talk about this behavior as part of a “stage.” Rather, she 
says, the behavior “just sort of evolved.” This is somewhat remarkable. Being 
strapped into a car seat and taken for a ride that inevitably ends in a nap 
might be seen as inconsistent with David’s need for “independence,” just as 
having his diaper changed is, and thus equally cause for being “insulted.”
 Ironically, another pair of parents in the same study use their daughter’s 
active resistance to being put in a car seat as an example of “this whole stage 
of development” and “the sort of independence thing she’s into now,” but in 
the same interview say “the thing that’s interesting is that sheallows you to 
clean her up, after changing her, a lot more easily than she used to. She used 
to hate to be cleaned up. She would twist and squirm.” 
 So, here, too, parents appear to be inconsistent. They take the child’s 
desire not to be manipulated into a car seat as a sign of a growing desire for 
“independence,” but are not bothered by the fact that this desire doesn’t seem 
to carry over to the similar event of having her diaper changed. And, oddly, 
this little girl exemplifies just the reverse pattern from David (who resents 
having his diaper changed, but willingly gets strapped into the car seat, even 
to take a nap).
 Many parents, and many others in our culture, consider stages to be 
“real” things that are “inside” their children. Further, they interpret these 
stages as signposts on the way to becoming an “independent” (and a rather 
“de-socialized”) person. But, it appears, parents label behaviors part of a stage 
only when these behaviors represent new behaviors of a sort that both could 
be seen as negative or difficult and that require from the parents new sorts of 
responses. 
 Behaviors that are not problematic in the parent–child relationship—e.g., 
David yielding to naps in his car seat or the little girl yielding peacefully to 
being diapered—are not labeled as stages. Furthermore, the parents interpret 
these potentially negative behaviors which get labeled as stages in terms of a 
socially valued notion of “independence,” a notion that other social groups 
within our society may well view as socially disruptive or as “anti-social.”
 These “theories” of or “stories” about “stages” and “independence” are 
partially conscious and partially unconscious. They are figured worlds (ways 
to figure or construe the world) and need not be fully in any parent or child’s 
 86 More on Figured Worlds
head, consciously or unconsciously, because they are available in the culture 
in which these parents live—through the media, through written materials, 
and through interaction with others in the society.
 These parents, situated within their own class-based Discourses, have a 
set of connected figured worlds about child development, stages, interaction 
between parents and children, and independence. Other social groups operate 
in terms of different figured worlds. For example, some working-class families 
operate in terms of figured worlds in which children are seen as inherently 
willful, independent, and selfish, and in need of socialization that leads not 
to more independence, but to collaboration with and caring about the needs 
of family and others.
 It is striking that the figured worlds in terms of which the Cambridge 
families operate are quite similar to the “formal theories” found in child 
psychology and child-rearing books. This should not really be surprising, 
however, since these are just the sorts of people that read and write such 
books. What we have to ask, however, is how much of psychology reflects the 
figured worlds of upper-middle-class people because psychologists hold these 
models as part and parcel of their class and culture-bound experiences in the 
world, and not because they are “true” in any scientific sense?
 In more recent work, Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods 
(2003) has identified two different models of what it means to raise children. 
These models are what we would call figured worlds. Her work is a close 
ethnographic study of child rearing in different homes. One model she calls 
the “cultivation model.” This model is applied mostly, though not exclusively, 
by middle- and upper-middle-class parents. The other model she calls the 
“natural growth model.” This model is applied mostly, though not exclusively, 
by non-middle-class parents, parents in the working class or poor parents.
 When parents hold the cultivation model they treat their child like a plant 
that must be constantly monitored and tended. They talk a good deal to their 
children, especially about topics that do not just involve the here and now. 
They use a good deal of “book language” and more adult vocabulary around 
their children, especially in the areas where their children have become “little 
experts” (e.g., on dinosaurs or trains), something these parents encourage. 
 Even though they are the ultimate authority in their homes, these parents 
negotiate with their children so that their children get lots of practice in devel-
oping arguments and explanations. They set up, monitor, and facilitate a great 
number of activities for their children, such as museum trips, travel, camps, 
special lessons (e.g., music), and special out-of-school activities (e.g., ballet). 
In the act, they heavily structure their children’s free time (and, yes, sometimes 
over-stress the children). They encourage their children to look adults in the eye 
and to present themselves to others as a confident and knowledgeable person 
or at least one with a right to an opinion. They encourage their children to 
develop mastery with digital tools—using things like games as a gateway—and 
help their child to relate this mastery to literacy and knowledge development.
 More on Figured Worlds 87
 Cultivated children can be, in some cases, too empowered, perhaps even 
at times obnoxious. They can be over-stressed and in need of more free time 
to just be children or even childish. Their parents, at times, too, can be too 
empowered and obnoxious. However, regardless of what you think of such 
parents and their children, the evidence is overwhelming that the cultivated 
model is deeply connected to success in school and to some aspects of success 
in society, at least at the level of income and higher-status jobs. 
 When parents hold the natural growth model, they treat their children 
like a plant that, with rich enough soil and nutrients, can be left without a 
lot of extra tending to develop naturally. Such parents love their children 
and care for them deeply and well. But they do not feel the need to intervene 
constantly in their children’s lives from the earliest years on. Often they 
cannot intervene as much as more well-off parents anyway because they are 
busy working and surviving. They talk less to their children and use less 
book-like and adult language with them. They tend to use more directives 
and commands with the children and not to negotiate with them much. 
They expect their children to be respectful and deferential to adults. They 
do not structure all their children’s free time and expect them to learn to 
find things to do with their peers and by themselves. They do not attempt to 
direct their children’s use of digital media (like games) towards other more 
school-based skills or engagement with computer software or higher-order 
literacy skills.
 Children raised with the natural growth model are often hard-working, 
self-sustaining, and respectful. They are not always comfortable with putting 
themselves forward or presenting themselves as knowledgeable even when 
they are. They are not always comfortable with engaging in arguments, expla-
nations, and opinions with adults, especially those they do not know. They 
have not built up lots of language, experience, and knowledge connected to 
the myriad of activities children raised on the cultivation model have. 
 Many children raised on the natural growth model have done just fine in 
school and have become significant successes in life. But, if we are thinking 
at a statistical level of group trends, they tend to do less well in school and in 
society, at least in regard to income and positions of power and status, which, 
of course, are not the only or even the most important markers of success. 
This is so, of course, in part, because schools themselves assume a cultivation 
model, but, by and large, leave it to parents to cultivate their children. And 
we must acknowledge, the two models we have discussed are really poles of 
a continuum and there are parenting styles in-between. 
 Lareau’s work is a goodexample of how figured worlds and practices 
interact to have real effects in society. People “figure” or construe the world 
of child rearing in certain ways. The figured worlds they use come from 
experiences they have had, which is why Lareau’s two models are class-based, 
passed on from family to family. Parents’ figured worlds about child rearing 
guide their behavior, their practices in regard to their children.
 88 More on Figured Worlds
 These practices, in turn, produce different types of children. In turn, insti-
tutions in society, like schools, are set up to take certain sorts of children as 
the norm and to deal with other sorts of children as “deviant,” “deficited,” 
or “not ready.” Such children, indeed, eventually come to seem “deviant” or 
“deficited” when the institution never offers them the “cultivation” the insti-
tution assumes all “normal” children have and need (so these kids get skill 
and drill and tracks in which they are closely supervised rather than trips to 
museums, one-on-one talk with adults, and immersion in passions of their 
own). Fairness would demand such institutions change either their assump-
tions or their practices.
Figured Worlds in Conflict
My second example demonstrates that each of us can have allegiance to 
competing and conflicting figured worlds. It also shows one way in which 
more powerful groups in society can influence less powerful groups. The 
example comes from Claudia Strauss”s (1992) studies of working-class 
men in Rhode Island (Strauss also uses the term “cultural model” instead of 
“figured world”).
 Consider for a moment a figured world common in the United States, 
a theory or story about “success” or “getting ahead,” as discussed by Roy 
D”Andrade (1984):
It seems to be the case that Americans think that if one has ability, and if, because 
of competition or one’s own strong drive, one works hard at achieving high goals, 
one will reach an outstanding level of accomplishment. And when one reaches 
this level one will be recognized as a success, which brings prestige and self-
satisfaction. (p. 95)
 So pervasive is this figured world in U.S. culture that D”Andrade goes on 
to say: “Perhaps what is surprising is that anyone can resist the directive force 
of such a system—that there are incorrigibles” (p. 98). However, people from 
different social groups within American society relate to this figured world in 
quite different ways.
 Claudia Strauss in her studies of working-class men in Rhode Island 
talking about their lives and work found that they accepted the above figured 
world of success. For example, one working man said:
I believe if you put an effort into anything, you can get ahead. . . . If I want to 
succeed, I”ll succeed. It has to be, come from within here. Nobody else is going 
to make you succeed but yourself . . . And, if anybody disagrees with that, there’s 
something wrong with them. (Strauss 1992, p. 202)
 However, most of the men Strauss studied did not, in fact, act on the 
success model in terms of their career choices or in terms of how they carried 
 More on Figured Worlds 89
out their daily lives. Unlike many white-collar professionals, these men 
did not choose to change jobs or regularly seek promotions. They did not 
regularly sacrifice their time with their families and their families’ interests 
for their own career advancement or “self-development.” These men recog-
nized the success model as a set of values and, in fact, judged themselves by 
this model, concluded that they had not really been “successful,” and thereby 
lowered their self-esteem.
 The reason these men did not actually act on the success model was due to 
the influence of another figured world, a theory or story which did affect their 
actual behaviors. This was the figured world of “being a breadwinner.” Unlike 
the individualism expressed in the success model, these workers, when they 
talked about their actual lives, assumed that the interests of the family came 
ahead of the interests of any individual in it, including themselves. For 
example, one worker said:
[The worker is discussing the workers’ fight against the company’s proposal 
mandating Sunday work] But when that changed and it was negotiated through a 
contract that you would work, so you had to change or keep losing that eight hours 
pay. With three children, I couldn’t afford it. So I had to go with the flow and work 
the Sundays. (Strauss 1992, p. 207)
 This is in sharp contrast to the white-collar professionals studied in Bellah 
et al.’s classic book Habits of the Heart (1996), professionals who carried their 
individualism so far as to be unsure whether they had any substantive respon-
sibility to their families if their families’ interests stood in the way of their 
“developing themselves” as individuals. These Rhode Island workers accepted 
the breadwinner figured world not just as a set of values with which to judge 
themselves and others. They saw this model not as a matter of choice, but 
rather as an inescapable fact of life (e.g., “had to change,” “had to go with the 
flow”). Thus, the values connected to this figured world (this way of figuring 
the world) were much more effective in shaping their routine daily behaviors. 
In fact, this very distinction—between mere “values” and “hard reality” (“the 
facts”)—is itself a particularly pervasive figured world within Western society. 
 In contrast to these working-class men, many white-collar professionals work 
in environments where the daily behaviors of those around them conform to the 
success figured world more than daily behaviors on the factory floor conform 
to this way of construing the world. For these professionals, then, their daily 
observations and social practices reinforce explicit ideological learning in regard 
to the figured world for success. For them, in contrast to the working-class men 
Strauss studied, the success figured world, not the breadwinner one, is seen as 
“an inescapable fact of life,” and, thus, for them, this way of construing the 
world determines not just their self-esteem, but many of their actual behaviors.
 The working-class men Strauss studied are, in a sense, “colonized” by the 
success figured world (we are all, in fact, “colonized” by a good many figured 
 90 More on Figured Worlds
worlds that have come to us without much reflection on our part about how 
well they fit our interests or serve us in the world). They use it, a way of 
looking at the world which actually fits the observations and behaviors of 
other groups in the society, to judge themselves and lower their self-esteem. 
But, as we have seen, since they fail to identify themselves as actors within 
that figured world, they cannot develop the very expertise that would allow 
and motivate them to practice it. In turn, they leave such expertise to the 
white-collar professionals, some of whom made the above worker work on 
Sunday against his own interests and wishes. On the other hand, many of 
these white-collar professionals fail to see that their very allegiance to the 
success figured world is connected to their failure to be substantive actors in 
their families or larger social and communal networks.
Different Sorts and Uses of Figured Worlds
What Strauss’s study leads us to see is that we need to distinguish between 
figured worlds based on how they are put to use and on the effects they have 
on us. We can distinguish between, at least, the following sorts of figured 
worlds in regard to these issues: 
A. Espoused worlds, that is, theories, stories, ways of looking at the world 
which we consciously espouse (say and often think we believe); 
B. Evaluative worlds, that is, theories, stories, ways of looking at the world 
which we use, consciously or unconsciously, to judge ourselves or others; 
C. Worlds-in-(inter)action, that is, theories, stories, or ways of looking at the 
world that consciously or unconsciously guide our actual actions and 
interactions in the world (regardlessof what we say or think we believe).
 Furthermore, figured worlds can be about “appropriate” attitudes, 
viewpoints, beliefs, and values; “appropriate” ways of acting, interacting, 
participating, and participant structures; “appropriate” social and institu-
tional organizational structures; “appropriate” ways of talking, listening, 
writing, reading, and communicating; “appropriate” ways to feel or display 
emotion; “appropriate” ways in which real and fictional events, stories, and 
histories are organized and end, and so on and so forth.
 Figured worlds are complexly, though flexibly, organized. There are smaller 
figured worlds inside bigger ones. Each figured world triggers or is associated with 
others, in different ways in different settings and differently for different sociocul-
turally defined groups of people. And, we can talk about “master figured worlds,” 
that is, sets of associated figured worlds, or single figured worlds, that help shape 
and organize large and important aspects of experience for particular groups of 
people, as well as the sorts of Conversations we discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.
 It is not uncommon that figured worlds are signaled by or associated with 
metaphors. Very often people are unaware of the full significance of these 
 More on Figured Worlds 91
metaphors, which usually have come to be taken for granted. Sometimes 
these metaphors are connected to “master models” in the sense that the 
tacit theories they imply are used widely to organize a number of significant 
domains for a given culture or social group.
 Consider, in this respect, Naomi Quinn’s (1987) studies on how people 
talk about marriage and divorce. Quinn finds that people organize a good 
deal of their thinking, acting, and interaction around marriage and divorce 
in terms of a small set of interlocked metaphors, e.g., “marriage is a form of 
effortful work like a job” or “marriage is an investment like investing money.” 
For instance, consider the following remark by a woman, whom Quinn calls 
“Nan,” talking about why she would not leave her marriage (Quinn 1987, p. 
176):
Why in the world would you want to stop and not get the use out of all the years 
you’ve already spent together?
 Notice that Nan makes a series of metaphorical equations here. She equates 
marriage with time spent in it. The phrase “time spent” here, then, triggers the 
well-known metaphor in our culture: “time 5 money,” so that time spent in 
marriage is being treated as an “investment” of time (like an investment of 
money). In terms of the investment metaphor, if we invest money/time, we 
are entitled to a “return.” So, according to this model, it is silly not to wait 
long enough, having made an investment, to see it “pay off” and be able to 
“get the use out of” the time/money that has been invested (rather like a 
retirement fund!).
 The whole idea of seeing things like effort and time as “investments” that 
will “pay off” is a master figured world (a master “theory” or way of seeing 
aspects of the world) that is used widely across a number of significant 
domains in our society. Here it is being used to talk about marriage, but the 
same model crops up in talk about careers, children, education, and so forth.
 Another example of a figured world signaled by a set of metaphors is the 
way in which many people in our culture treat argumentation as a form of 
warfare: e.g., “she couldn’t defend her argument,” “I defeated his argument,” 
“she retreated from her claims,” “he wouldn’t give up his claim,” “she marshaled 
her evidence,” etc. This can become a master figured world (a master way to 
figure aspects of the world), as well, when people begin to extend it to think 
about personal, institutional, and political relationships as battles or contests, 
as many, in fact, do.
Figured Worlds Can Be Partial and Inconsistent
It should be clear by now that figured worlds are deeply implicated in 
“politics.” By “politics” I mean anything and anyplace (talk, texts, media, 
action, interaction, institutions) where “social goods” are at stake, things like 
 92 More on Figured Worlds
power, status, or valued knowledge, positions, or possessions. Since figured 
worlds embed assumptions about what is “appropriate,” “typical,” and/or 
“normal,” they are, through and through, political.
 Figured worlds, though they are theories (explanations), need not be 
complete, fully formed, or consistent. Their partiality and inconsistency 
are sometimes the result of the fact that one figured world can incorporate 
different and conflicting values, or values connected to groups to which some 
people who use the figured world don’t actually belong, or, at least, values that 
serve other people’s interests better than their own. Sometimes it can be hard 
to tell whether a person is using two conflicting figured worlds (as in Claudia 
Strauss’s work above) or one heterogeneous, conflicting one.
 But ultimately, the partiality and inconsistency of figured worlds reflects 
the fact that we have all had a great many diverse and conflicting experiences; 
we all belong to different, sometimes conflicting groups; and we are all influ-
enced by a wide array of groups, texts, institutions, and media that may, in 
reality, reflect our “best interests” more or less poorly. 
 To get at some of these matters, let us look at some remarks made by a 
middle-school Latina in the midst of an interview about her life, her attitudes 
towards family, school, and society, and her views on issues like racism and 
sexism. We will call this young women “Marcella” (not her real name). Below, 
I reprint Marcella’s remarks. In Chapter 9 I will discuss “lines and stanzas,” 
but, for now, just treat the numbered lines and the stanzas in the text below 
as a way to make Marcella’s themes clearer. 
Interviewer: Uh huh. Um, why do you think there are relatively few African-
American and Hispanic doctors?
STANZA 1
 1. Because like white people get more education. [I: mmhm] 
 2. Like Hispanic people don’t, don’t, some of the Hispanic don’t like go to college 
and stuff like that. [I: mm hm] 
STANZA 2
 3. And you know, just, the white people just like, they like to, they want a future, 
 4. You know, they, some, some Hispanic and stuff they, they just, 
 5. I’m Hispanic but I’m saying
 6. So [I: mm hm] um, they just like, like to hang around, 
 7. They don’t want to go to school, you know, 
STANZA 3
 8. So white people don’t, don’t think like that. 
 9. They want to get an education 
10. They want to have, their [?life] 
11. And they really don’t care what people say, 
 More on Figured Worlds 93
STANZA 4
12. Like if they make fun of em. [I: mm hm] 
13. Like gringos and stuff like that. 
14. They don’t, they don’t care, 
15. They just do their work 
STANZA 5
16. And then, they see after, they’re like, they’re married and they have their 
professions and stuff, made, then, let’s see who’s gonna like, be better, 
17. Maybe the Hispanic boy that said that you gonna, that like you’re a nerd or 
something? [I: mm hm] 
18. Probably in the streets looking for sh, for money and stuff like that. [I: mm 
hm] [?sick] 
19. And you have a house, you have your profession, you got money, [I: mm hm] 
STANZA 6
20. I, it’s like I think like white people are smarter.
Interviewer: You think white people are smarter?
21. Yeah. 
22. Cos I think like, you guys get more education than we do. [I: mm hm] 
Interviewer: Why, I’m not sure why you’re saying white people are smarter?
23. Because they get more education, they’re smarter. [I: mm hm] 
24. I don’t know, they,—
Interviewer: Going to school makes them smarter? Or you mean, you know they’re 
smarter because they go to school more? 
STANZA 7
25. They’re just, they’re just smarter. 
26. They, they, both, they go to school 
27. And they, they, it’s like they make an effort to be smart. 
28. They make a effort, not, 
29. Some, some white people and some Hispanics try to be more than something 
else, they try to bemore than somebody else, 
STANZA 8
30. But not I’ve seen the white people they want, they just want to be, they just 
wanna be smart, you know, 
31. For so, when you go to college or something you know, you know how many 
points you have so you can make your career 
32. You study [?all that] and you, I think, don’t care about anybody else, 
33. You just care about you, your profession, 
 94 More on Figured Worlds
STANZA 9
34. And then, you have your kids and you teach them the same thing. [I: uh huh] 
35. You know, like you pass already and all that. [I: uh huh] 
36. You have example for your kids and stuff. 
Interviewer: Uh huh. What do you mean you don’t care about anybody else?
STANZA 10
37. You, just, you know, like, oh you are, you’re a nerd, you’re a nerd cos you 
always do your homework 
38. and you gonna stop doing your homework so they won’t call you nerd no 
more. [I: uh huh] 
39. You know, they they they don’t, they don’t care, 
40. They just keep on going. 
Interviewer: What is it about white people do you think that makes them like that?
Stanza 11
41. They’re just smart. [slight laugh] [I: Uh huh]
42. I think they were born smart.
43. There’s something like, their moms or something they give em a little piece of 
smart or something. [slight laugh] [I: laughs] 
44. [?So they”ll be smart]
 One way to get at people’s figured worlds is to ask: “What must I assume 
this person (consciously or unconsciously) believes in order to make deep 
sense of what he or she is saying?,” or, to put the question another way: 
“What must I assume about how this person looks at (construes, ‘figure’) 
aspects of the world to make deep sense of what he or she is saying?”
 Interestingly, when we ask these questions about Marcella’s remarks, we 
see that she holds a figured world quite close, in some respects, to a formal 
theory in sociology, namely the theory of the reproduction of cultural capital. 
This theory says that certain sorts of homes, usually middle-class homes, 
socialize their children early in life through practices that “resonate” with 
the practices of schools. At the same time, schools honor these practices, as 
if they were “natural,” universal, and “normal,” while ignoring the practices 
and values of other sorts of homes. 
 Thus, these advantaged children not only “take to” school well, “buying into” 
its values and practices, they also come to school ahead of the game and look 
(and are often treated as if they are) “gifted” or “high ability.” The cultural capital 
of the home translates into “value” in the school where it is “compounded” with 
“interest” and then passed on as an “inheritance” through the school-focused 
home-based socialization of the next generation. Thus, the cultural capital (that is, 
the values, attitudes, norms, beliefs, and practices, not just the economic “goods”) 
of middle-class homes are “reproduced” (rewarded and sustained) by schools and 
renewed when the children, as adults, later socialize their own children at home.
 More on Figured Worlds 95
 In stanzas 8 and 9, Marcella comes close to her own version of the theory 
of the reproduction of cultural capital. But, it is clear from many different 
parts of her text that her figured world version of this theory is mixed with 
a tenet that “white people” are inherently smarter and more motivated than 
Hispanic people (see stanzas 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 11—e.g., stanza 11: “I think 
they were born smart”). This is a tenet that is, in fact, inconsistent with 
the formal theory of the reproduction of cultural capital (which is meant 
to explain why certain sorts of people are treated by schools as if they were 
smarter than others, when they are not inherently so). 
 Marcella seems also to use a related figured world in terms of which 
motivation and effort follow from being inherently “smarter”: e.g., in stanza 
7, she says, “They’re just, they’re just smarter . . . And they, they, it’s like they 
make an effort to be smart.”
 There is, then, a contradiction here with Marcella’s figured world version 
of the reproduction of cultural capital. If home-based practices can account 
for the differential success of “white” people (see stanza 9), and if many 
of the attitudes, values, and practices that schools and certain middle-class 
homes reward are arbitrary (note Marcella’s remarks in stanza 8: “you know 
how many points you have so you can make your career” and you “don’t care 
about anybody else”), then we don’t need to assume or appeal to the idea that 
“whites” are inherently smarter. Much as the working-class men in Claudia 
Strauss’s studies were “colonized” by the way in which they used the “Success 
Model,” so, too, the “bite” of the theory of the reproduction of cultural capital 
in terms of which Marcella might indict the schools for their “conspiracy” 
with certain homes and not others, is mitigated by her attributing success as 
an inherent inborn property of “whites.”
 At the same time, it is clear that authentic education has much to work 
with in Marcella’s own social theorizing. She has already hit upon, based on 
her own experiences, some of the ways in which families, race, class, and 
schools function politically in society. On this basis, school could certainly 
help her build a more overt understanding and theorizing of history, society, 
politics, and institutions. That school has failed to do this for Marcella (and 
continues to as she now enters high school) is, of course, ironically part of 
the indictment inherent in the theory of the reproduction of cultural capital.
Figured Worlds as Tools of Inquiry
Figured worlds offer us another “tool of inquiry.” They lead us to ask, when 
confronted with a piece of talk, writing, action, or interaction, questions like 
these: 
A. What figured worlds are relevant here? What must I, as an analyst, assume 
people feel, value, and believe, consciously or not, in order to talk (write), act, 
and/or interact this way?
 96 More on Figured Worlds
B. Are there differences here between the figured worlds that are affecting espoused 
beliefs and those that are affecting actual actions and practices? What sorts of 
figured worlds, if any, are being used here to make value judgments about oneself 
or others?
C. How consistent are the relevant figured worlds here? Are there competing 
or conflicting figured worlds at play? Whose interests are the figured worlds 
representing?
D. What other figured worlds are related to the ones most active here? Are there 
“master figured worlds” at work?
E. What sorts of texts, media, experiences, interactions, and/or institutions could 
have given rise to these figured worlds?
F. How are the relevant figured worlds here helping to reproduce, transform, 
or create social, cultural, institutional, and/or political relationships? What 
Discourses and Conversations are these figured worlds helping to reproduce, 
transform, or create?
 We always assume, until absolutely proven otherwise, that everyone has 
“good reasons” and makes “deep sense” in terms of their own socioculturally 
specific ways of talking, listening (writing, reading), acting, interacting, 
valuing, believing, and feeling. Of course, we are all members of multiple 
Discourses and so the analytic task is often finding which of these, and with 
what blends, are operative in the communication. 
 The assumption of “good reasons” and “deep sense” is foundational to 
discourse analysis. It is not only a moral principle. It is based, as well, on 
the viewpoint, amply demonstrated in work in cognitive science, applied 
linguistics, and in a variety of different approaches to discourse analysis, that 
humans are, as creatures, par excellence sense makers. Within their Discourses, 
they move to sense, the way certain plants move to light.
 We obviously do not gain our evidence for figured worlds by opening up 
people’s heads. And we don’t need to. Besides closely observing what they say 
and do, we look, as well, at the texts, media,social practices, social and insti-
tutional interactions, and diverse Discourses that influence them. As in the 
case of context and situated meanings in the last chapter, we can always gain 
more information. Thus, our conclusions are always tentative. However, here, 
too, we hope that eventually there comes a point where more information 
does not lead to substantive revision of our conclusions. This issue is related 
to the larger one of validity, an issue I take up in Chapter 8.
Readings
Barsalou, L. W. (1999a). Language comprehension: Archival memory or preparation 
for situated action. Discourse Processes, 28, 61–80. [This and the following article 
discuss how meanings arise from embodied experiences connected to goals and 
actions. These two papers are important for understanding my discussion in this 
chapter about simulations in the mind]
Barsalou, L. W. (1999b). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 
22, 577–660.
 More on Figured Worlds 97
Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swindler, A. & Tipton, S. M. (1996). 
Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Updated Edition. 
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition: Philosophy, cognitive science, and parallel distributed 
processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Clark’s books are the best ones on how 
humans think through their bodies, tools, and the environments they act in, not 
just inside their heads]
Clark, A. (1993). Associative engines: Connectionism, concepts, and representational 
change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, 
MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born cyborgs: Why minds and technologies are made to merge. 
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D’Andrade, R. (1984). Cultural meaning systems, in R. A. Shweder & R. A. LeVine, 
Eds. Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, pp. 88–119. [A classic early source on “cultural models”]
D’Andrade, R. (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. [More on cultural models]
D’Andrade, R. & Strauss, C., Eds. (1992). Human motives and cultural models. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Classic early collection of articles on 
cultural models]
Fillmore, C. (1975). An alternative to checklist theories of meaning, in C. Cogen, H. 
Thompson, G. Thurgood, K. Whistler, & J. Wright, Eds. Proceedings of the First 
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: University of California 
at Berkeley, pp. 123–131. [Early classic article on “frames” that helped lead to the 
cultural models literature]
Gee, J. P. (1992). The social mind: Language, ideology, and social practice. New York: 
Bergin & Garvey. [A book on so-called “connectionism” or “neural networks” and 
how this approach to the mind leads us to see the mind as social]
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. 
London: Routledge. [A discussion of situated meanings and situated learning. This 
book contains a longer discussion of thinking as “simulations in the mind”]
Hanks, W. F. (1996). Language and communicative practices. Boulder, CO: Westview 
Press. [An excellent book on language, context, and culture]
Harkness, S., Super, C., & Keefer, C. H. (1992). Learning to be an American parent: 
How cultural models gain directive force, in R. D’Andrade & C. Strauss, Eds. 
Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 
163–178. [Important paper on cultural models. This is where my discussion of 
different models of child rearing comes from]
Holland, D. & Quinn, N., Eds. (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. [Important early collection of papers on cultural models]
Holland, D., Skinner, D., Lachicotte, W., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in 
cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [This is where the 
term “figured worlds” comes from, Holland’s replacement for the term “cultural 
models”]
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the 
mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [This and the next book are influential 
discussions of how metaphors organize a good deal of language and thought]
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press.
 98 More on Figured Worlds
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University 
of California Press.
Quinn, N. (1987). Convergent evidence for a cultural model of American marriage, 
in D. Holland & N. Quinn, Eds. Cultural models in language and thought. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 173–192. [A classic paper on 
cultural models]
Strauss, C. (1992). What makes Tony run? Schemas as motives reconsidered, in R. 
D”Andrade & C. Strauss, Eds. Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, pp. 197–224. [A classic paper on cultural models—
important material on how cultural models and socioeconomic class interact]
Strauss, C. & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. [The best overall summary of the cultural models 
approach]
CHAPTER SEVEN
Context
■■ Context and Reflexivity  100
■■ Context and the Building Tasks  101
■■ Situated Meanings and Figured Worlds Revisited  103
■■ An Example  106
■■ Social Languages and Discourses Revisited  107
■■ An Example  109
■■ Intertextuality and Conversations  112
■■ An Example  113
 100 Context
Context and Reflexivity
In this chapter, I summarize where we have gotten so far and deal with the 
crucial notion of context. I show how our building tools and tools of inquiry 
relate to the role of context in language use. This will prepare us to discuss in 
the next chapter what constitutes an “ideal” discourse analysis (something we 
approach but never really reach) and what makes any analysis discourse “valid.”
 Context is an important notion for understanding language-in-use and for 
understanding the nature of discourse analysis (which is, after all, the study 
of language-in-use). When we speak or write we never say all that we mean. 
Spelling everything out in words explicitly would take far too long. Speakers 
and writers rely on listeners and readers to use the context in which things 
are said and written to fill in meanings that are left unsaid, but assumed to 
be inferable from context. Even a simple utterance like “The paper is on the 
table” requires that the hearer infer from context what paper and what table 
is meant.
 We saw in Chapter 6, when we discussed Hanks’s work on language in 
the Yucatan Peninsula, the crucial role shared cultural knowledge plays as 
part of the context in which we speak or write. Context includes more than 
shared knowledge, however. Context includes the physical setting in which 
a communication takes place and everything in it; the bodies, eye gaze, 
gestures, and movements of those present; what has previously been said and 
done by those involved in the communication; any shared knowledge those 
involved have, including shared cultural knowledge. However, when inter-
preting language (either as listeners/readers or discourse analysts) we really 
do not use all of the context. We use only the relevant parts of the context, 
the parts that are actually relevant to figuring out what the speaker or writer 
means to say.
 Let me give an example of what I mean by relevant parts of the context, 
or parts of the context being relevant to interpreting what someone has said. 
Imagine an orange rubber duck is sitting near someone and the person says, 
“This duck really bothers me.” The rubber duck is obviously a relevant part 
of the context and we use it to interpret the phrase “this duck” to mean “this 
orange rubber duck sitting nextto the speaker.” 
 If the speaker says, “I just got a gift,” then maybe he means the duck and 
maybe he doesn’t and we cannot really tell yet whether the rubber duck is a 
relevant part of the context. If the speaker says, “Let’s go to a movie,” then 
probably the rubber duck is not a relevant part of the context, not a part of 
the context that we need to use to fully interpret what the speaker means. The 
frame problem, which we discussed in Chapter 5, tells us that it can be hard 
to know sometimes how much of the context in which something has been 
said or written is relevant to interpreting what it means.
 The example of the rubber duck is an example of the role of physical 
objects as context. What has been said or written before the current utterance 
 Context 101
or statement is also context, so is any shared knowledge and shared histories 
of interaction between speaker and listener. These, too, function like the 
rubber duck. What the speaker says and how the speaker says it makes them 
relevant or not or, if things are not totally clear, forces the listener to make a 
guess as to what is or is not relevant.
 Context in writing is obviously somewhat different than context in 
speech because writer and reader are not face-to-face physically encoun-
tering each other. Gesture and eye gaze do not play a role as context in 
writing, for example. But the previous text before the current statement and 
shared knowledge and even shared histories (for example, in letters or text 
messaging), for example, are still parts of the context for writing.
 When we think about how context works, we quickly face an important 
property of language, a property I will call “reflexivity.” This is a rather 
“magical” property of language. We can see this property clearly by consid-
ering even so simple an exchange as: “How ya doin’?,” “Fine” between 
colleagues in an office corridor. Why do they use these words in this context? 
Because they take the context they are in to be but a brief and mundane 
encounter between fellow workers at work and these are “appropriate” words 
to use in such a situation. But why do they take the context to be thus? In 
part, because they are using just such words and related behaviors. Had the 
exchange opened with “What’s YOUR problem, buddy?,” the situation would 
have been construed quite differently. 
 Here we face, then, a chicken and egg question: Which comes first? The 
context or the language? This question reflects an important reciprocity 
between language and context: language simultaneously reflects context 
(what is out there in the world) and constructs (construes) it to be a certain 
way. While “reciprocity” would be a good term for this property of language, 
the more commonly used term is “reflexivity” (in the sense of language and 
context being like two mirrors facing each other and constantly and endlessly 
reflecting their own images back and forth between each other).
 Language then always simultaneously reflects and constructs the context in 
which it is used. Usually, aspects of the context (for example, that I am talking 
to a friend) are really out there in the world, apart from my talk, and, at the 
same time, are produced (or reproduced) by my talk (for example, if I talk to 
my friend as a friend in a friendly way, then I make or mark the relationship 
between us as one of friendship). A person is a friend of mine even when I 
am not talking to that person, but he or she would soon cease to be a friend 
if I did not talk to and treat them as a friend in actual performances.
Context and the Building Tasks
Context and the building tasks we discussed in Chapter 2 have a good deal 
to do with each other. Speakers and writers use their language to signal to 
us what to build and how to build it. When we listeners and readers build 
 102 Context
appropriately (following the guides of the speaker or writer) we are actually 
building not just on the basis of what was said explicitly, but also on the basis 
of what the speaker or writer is signaling to us counts as the relevant parts of 
the context. We are construing the context in terms of which aspects of it are 
relevant for interpreting the words the speaker or writer has used.
 We build based on what is said and what is implied about how the context 
is relevant to interpretation. Below I list each building task in terms of how 
that task helps construct what are (or what we take to be) the relevant parts 
of the context in which something was said or written: 
1. Significance: Given what the speaker has said or the writer has written, 
and how it has been said or written, what things and which people 
in this context are relevant and significant and in what ways are they 
significant? How is the speaker or writer trying to give significance to 
things?
2. Practices (Activities): Given what the speaker has said or the writer has 
written, and how it has been said or written, what practice (activity) or 
practices (activities) are relevant in this context and how are they being 
enacted?
3. Identities: Given what the speaker has said or the writer has written, and 
how it has been said or written, what identity or identities (for the speaker/
writer, the listener/ hearer, and in terms of how others are depicted) are 
relevant in this context?
4. Relationships: Given what the speaker has said or the writer has written, 
and how it has been said or written, what relationships are relevant in this 
context and how are they being enacted, recruited, and used?
5. Politics: Given what the speaker has said or the writer has written, and 
how it has been said or written, what social goods are relevant and at stake 
in this context and how are they being distributed or how is their distri-
bution being viewed?
6. Connections: Given what the speaker has said or the writer has written, 
and how it has been said or written, what are the relevant connections 
and disconnections between things and people in this context and how 
are these connections or disconnections being made or implied?
7. Sign Systems and Knowledge: Given what the speaker has said or the 
writer has written, and how it has been said or written, what are the 
relevant sign systems (e.g., languages or social languages) and forms of 
knowledge (ways of knowing) that are relevant in this context and how 
are they used and privileged or disprivileged?
 Any piece of language, oral or written, is composed of a set of grammatical 
cues or clues that help listeners or readers (in negotiation and collaboration 
with others in an interaction) to build the things our seven building tasks 
build. We build based on what is explicitly said and what we infer from 
 Context 103
context. The speaker or writer cues us or clues us into what are the relevant 
parts of the context for full interpretation of what is said or written. 
 Thus, in an utterance like “The paper is on the table,” the definite article 
(“the”) on “paper” and “table” is a cue that the listener already knows (from 
previous talk or shared background knowledge) or can see which paper and 
table is meant. The listener uses these parts of the context to make the right 
paper and table relevant and significant in this context for this communication.
 Or to take another example, imagine that John asks Mary, “Do you think 
Susan is a racist?” and Mary answers, “Well, she’s a Southerner, isn’t she?” 
The way Mary has formulated her answer cues the listener into taking the 
past racial problems of the South in the United States as a relevant part of the 
context. It also cues the listener into the fact that Mary is operating with a 
figured world that assumes all Southerners are racists and that she is taking 
this figured world to be a relevant part of the context (taking it to be shared 
knowledge, when, in fact, the listener might not believe it).
 We see here that building with language is a mutual process. The speaker or 
writer builds the seven things our building tasksare concerned with through 
explicitly saying things and through cues as to how the listener or reader ought 
to construe what is relevant in the context. In turn, the listener or reader (if he or 
she is being cooperative) builds accordingly, using the speaker or writer’s words, 
in order to build up a view of the world the speaker or writer is operating with. 
Together, they build significance, enact practices and identities, and relation-
ships, make connections, engage in politics (the distribution of social goods), 
and privilege or disprivilege various system systems (e.g., languages) and ways 
of knowing the world. According to the reflexive property of language and 
context, these things may be already “out there” in the world, but they do not 
operate until we make them do so. They are not relevant until we make them so, 
through performing the active process of building, interpreting, and construing 
how the world works and is relevant here and now for this communication.
Situated Meanings and Figured Worlds Revisited
Situated meanings and figured worlds, which we introduced as tools of 
inquiry in Chapter 5, are also integrally related to how language and context 
work. Situated meanings are the specific meanings words and phrases take 
on in specific contexts of use. While figured worlds are (partly) theories or 
stories people have in their heads, we must use what is said in context, how 
it is said, and what are the relevant bits of context to figure out what figured 
worlds a speaker or writer is using in a given context. People have many 
different, sometimes inconsistent, figured worlds in their heads. So we must 
figure out in given contexts which ones are operating at that time and place.
 A situated meaning is assembled “on the spot” as we communicate in a 
given context, based on our construal of that context. In Chapter 5, I used 
the example: “The coffee spilled, go get a mop”; “The coffee spilled, go get 
 104 Context
a broom.” In the first case, triggered by the word “mop” in the context, 
you assemble a situated meaning something like “dark liquid we drink” for 
“coffee”; in the second case, triggered by the word “broom,” you assemble 
either a situated meaning something like “grains that we make our coffee 
from” or like “beans from which we grind coffee.” Visible brown liquid on the 
ground can accomplish the same thing as the word “mop” and the speaker 
can say “The coffee spilled, clean it up” relying on the liquid in the context 
telling us to get a mop. Of course, in a real context, there are many more 
signals as to how to go about assembling situated meanings for words and 
phrases.
 Situated meanings don’t simply reside ready-made in individual minds; 
very often they are negotiated between people in and through communicative 
social interaction. For example, imagine someone in a relationship saying “I 
think good relationships shouldn’t take work.” A good part of the conversation 
following such a remark might very well involve mutually negotiating what 
“work” is going to mean for the people concerned, in this specific context, 
as well as in the larger context of their ongoing relationship. Furthermore, as 
conversations (and, indeed, relationships) develop, participants continually 
revise their situated meanings.
 Figured worlds relate to situated meanings in this way: Figured worlds 
are theories or stories that often help guide us in the process of constructing 
situated meanings. When someone says, “Relationships take work,” we can 
only figure out what specific situated meanings they are giving “relationships” 
and “work” if we know or can guess what their figured worlds for relation-
ships and work are. What theory or story about relationships and work are 
they using here? As a listener, I may come to see that I “figure” (construe, 
story, theorize), based on my experiences in the world, relationships and 
work differently than you do. In turn, this may lead to dispute or negotiation 
over what, in this context, we ought to mean by “relationships” and “work.”
 Some figured worlds are shared widely across many Discourses, some are 
not. My own figured world of how avid bird watchers go about bird watching 
in nature has been built out of my experiences with birders, though from the 
periphery of the Discourse (I am not a “real” birder), and it is probably not 
shared in any great degree with non-birders. And, by the way, if you don’t 
think bird watchers constitute a Discourse, read Mark Cocker’s book Birders: 
Tales of the Tribe (2001) and you will quickly realize that birders enact and 
recognize distinctive social identities and activities. 
 On the other hand, my figured world of how politics and money work in the 
United States (i.e., that money often speaks louder than votes) is shared with 
many other people in the United States, regardless of whether we are members 
of all the same Discourses or not, though, of course, not with all of the other 
people in the United States. Even here it may be the case that members of some 
Discourses (e.g., academics, professionals, or working-class people) may share the 
details of my figured world more or less closely thanks to our shared Discourses.
 Context 105
 Figured worlds “explain,” relative to the standards of some group, why 
words have the various situated meanings they do and fuel their ability to 
grow more. Figured worlds, too, are usually not completely stored in any 
one person’s head. Rather, they are distributed across the different sorts of 
“expertise” and viewpoints found in the group much like a plot to a story (or 
pieces of a puzzle) that different people have different bits of and which they 
can potentially share in order to mutually develop the “big picture.”
 In Chapter 6 I pointed out that figured worlds are connected to proto-
typical simulations we can run in our heads. Because we humans share ways 
of looking at things with other members of our various social and cultural 
groups, we all have the capacity to form prototypical simulations. Prototypical 
simulations are the sorts of simulations you will run in your head (of things 
like weddings, parenting, voting, and so forth) when you take the situation to 
be “typical.” Of course, what is taken as “typical” differs across different social 
and cultural groups of people. Your figured world of weddings, for instance, 
is connected to the sort of simulation or simulations you will run (imagine) 
when you imagine what you (and your social group) take to be “typical” 
weddings. 
 However, figured worlds, while connected to the prototypical simulations 
we can run in our heads, are, as we have said, not just in our heads. An 
upper-middle-class parent may have specific figured worlds in her head about 
child rearing (e.g., a piece of one may be that early experiences in childhood 
are crucially connected to the child’s later gaining admission to a prestigious 
college). The parent, however, shares these figured worlds with her social 
group, from whom she picked them up, and can learn more about them from 
that group.
 Figured worlds link to each other in complex ways to create bigger and 
bigger storylines. Such linked networks of figured worlds help organize the 
thinking and social practices of sociocultural groups. For example, we saw 
in Chapter 6 that some people use a figured world (really a connected set of 
them) for raising young children that runs something like this: Children are 
born dependent on their parents and then they go through various stages 
during which they often engage in disruptive behaviors in pursuit of their 
growing desire for independence. This figured world, too, is not solely in 
people’s heads—it is often supplemented from sources like self-help guides 
for raising children, guides that tend to reflect the theories and values of 
middle-class people.
 This figured world, which integrates models for children, child rearing, 
stages, development, and independence, as well as others, helpsparents 
explain their children’s behavior in terms of values the group holds (e.g., 
independence). It is continually revised and developed (consciously and 
unconsciously) in interaction with others in the group, as well as through 
exposure to various books and other media. Other social groups view children 
differently: for example, as beings who start out as too unsocialized and 
 106 Context
whose disruptive behaviors are not so much signs of their growing desire for 
independence as they are signals of their need for greater socialization within 
the family, i.e., for less independence (less “selfishness”).
An Example
Let me give you an example of how situated meanings and figured worlds 
interact. Consider the sentence below:
yet I believe [Milton] Friedman is right that thoroughgoing restrictions on 
economic freedom would turn out to be inconsistent with democracy. (http://www.
becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/11/on_milton_fried.html)
 The word “democracy” in a general dictionary means “forms of government 
where people vote for representatives.” So how could “thoroughgoing restric-
tions on economic freedom” be inconsistent with democracy? Surely people 
in some countries could vote to enact such restrictions and this would seem 
to be an example of democracy in action.
 A reader can only know what specific situated meaning the word 
“democracy” has here if the reader knows the figured worlds with which the 
author is operating. This writer assumes that free and unregulated markets 
(i.e., where people in a society are free to buy and sell things as they please) 
are both what makes wealth in a society and what keeps each individual free 
from coercion by others (who cannot then just take his or her possessions or 
life). People would not choose, on this view, to enter and take part in a voting 
society that could vote away economic freedom in this sense, since then others 
could take away their wealth and possessions. Since a democracy is based on 
the “consent of the governed” to abide by the outcome of votes, it assumes 
people have agreed, in some sense, to enter and take part in the democracy. 
Thus, with strong “economic freedom” (free markets) a democracy would not 
really have the “consent of the governed.”
 This figured world is an assumed part of the context on the part of the 
writer. The mention of Milton Friedman (the Nobel Prize-winning economist) 
who strongly advocated this worldview keys us into that fact. Once we bring 
this figured world into play, we can situate a specific meaning for the word 
“democracy” here (something like: “a society that votes for representation but 
cannot vote to take away economic freedom in any way that would greatly 
restrict the operation of free markets”).
 If you do not know the figured world sketched above, then you do not 
know it is both part of the context of the sentence and a relevant part of it. 
You cannot situate a meaning for the word “democracy,” and its general-
dictionary-like meaning will only make the sentence seem contradictory. 
Knowing this figured world also helps you engage in the building tasks. 
For example, it tells you the author is speaking out of an identity as a 
 Context 107
“neo-liberal” (a believer in free markets). Together with the rest of what 
the writer says, a reader can also see that the writer is advocating (this is a 
practice or activity) his figured world as the correct way to make the world 
work.
 The author’s figured world was part of an academic theory (in economics) 
that Milton Friedman held. Since it is not fully spelled out in the article from 
which I took the quote, it functions there more like a figured world than a 
formal theory. However, even in Friedman’s work—and certainly in the ways 
in which he advocated U.S. policies in South America, for instance (where 
the U.S. used coercion to install regimes favoring Friedman’s views)—it is 
arguable that his “theory” often functioned more as a figured world (i.e., a 
taken-for-granted and oversimplified view of how the world works or should 
work) than a theory for which there was strong impartial evidence. In the end, 
in any case, formal theories (which are also simplified ways of understanding 
a complex reality) are types of figured worlds, though we hope that they are 
less taken for granted and more impartially vetted than most everyday figured 
worlds.
Social Languages and Discourses Revisited
I turn now to our other two tools of inquiry: social language and Discourses. 
These are integrally connected to our building tasks, since they are both 
ways of enacting (performing) identities and practices (activities): two of our 
building tasks. Thus, when we speak or write we use social languages and 
Discourses to signal (build, enact) different identities and practices. When we 
listen or read we use the social languages and Discourses we see or assume 
to be at play to guide us in construing what identities and practices are being 
enacted.
 What is important to discourse analysis are not languages at the level of 
English and Navaho. All languages, whether English or Navaho, are, as we 
argued in Chapter 4, composed of many different social languages. Physicists 
engaged in experiments don’t speak and write like street-gang members 
engaged in initiating a new member, and neither of these speak or write like 
“new capitalist” entrepreneurs engaged in “empowering front-line workers.” 
Each social language uses somewhat different and characteristic grammatical 
resources to carry out our seven building tasks. 
 All of us control many different social languages and switch among them 
in different contexts. In that sense, no one is a monolingual. But, also, all of 
us also fail to have mastery of some social languages even though these social 
languages use the grammatical resources of our “native language.” Thus, too, 
in that sense, we are not (any of us) “native speakers” of the full gamut of 
social languages which compose “our” language.
 It is important, as well, to note that very often social languages are not 
“pure,” but, rather, people mix (“hybridize”) them in complex ways for 
 108 Context
specific purposes. It is sometimes quite hard to know whether it is best to 
say that someone is switching from one social language to another (“code 
switching”) or actually mixing two of them to assemble, for a given context, 
a transformed (even novel) social language (which may, of course, eventually 
come to be seen as a “pure” and different social language in its own right, 
when people forget that it arose as a mixture). It is, of course, more important, 
in a discourse analysis, to recognize this matter than to settle it. People can 
even mix or switch between different social languages that are drawn from 
different languages at the level of things like English and Navaho. 
 It is social languages which contain the clues or cues that guide the seven 
building tasks above. Different social languages contain different sorts of cues 
or clues, that is, they use grammar in different ways as a resource for the seven 
building tasks. For example, consider again the young woman above who said 
to her parents, “Well, when I thought about it, I don’t know, it seemed to me 
that Gregory should be the most offensive,” and to her boyfriend, “What an 
ass that guy was, you know, her boyfriend,” when she was talking about the 
same character in the same story. These utterances are in two different social 
languages.
 In the first case, when the young woman is speaking to her parents, the 
following sort of pattern of grammatical features is indicative of a particular 
social language: a preliminary clause about having been reflective (“when I 
thought about it”); mitigators (“I don’t know,” “seemed to me”); complex 
subordinating syntax (when-clause, it-seems-that construction); repeated 
references to self (“I,” “me”) as careful claimer/knower; Latinate vocabulary 
(“offensive”); complex modality (“should be”). This sociallanguage contains 
clues and cues for deference, respect, school-based learning, reflection, 
attention to knowledge and claims, and so forth.
 In the second case, when the young woman is speaking to her boyfriend, 
the following sort of pattern of grammatical features is indicative of another 
sort of social language: Exclamation (“What an ass . . .”); informal vocabulary 
(“ass,” “guy”); right dislocation (“her boyfriend”); attention to hearer (“you 
know”); directly making claims with no mitigators or attention to self as 
claimer. This social language contains clues or cues for solidarity, informality, 
participatory communication, attention to shared values, and a focus on the 
social world and not the self.
 Such patterns are part and parcel of the collocational patterns (patterns 
created by the way we combine traditional grammatical units) we discussed 
in Chapter 4. Interpreters (listeners or readers) who are members of the 
Discourses whose social languages these are recognize (however uncon-
sciously) the patterns in the same rapid and intuitive way they recognize the 
situated meanings of words.
 Discourses are ways of enacting socially significant identities and 
associated practices in society through language (social languages) and ways 
of acting, interacting, valuing, knowing, believing and using things, tools, and 
 Context 109
technologies at appropriate times and places. For someone to “pull off” being 
recognized as a nuclear physicist, a viable politician, or a street-gang member 
requires more than language and it requires that language integrates smoothly 
with ways of being and doing in the world.
 Often in discourse analysis what we are trying to do is to use language to 
uncover the workings of Discourse in society. Society is basically composed of 
Discourses and it is their interactions with each other that determine a good 
deal of history and the workings of society for good or ill.
An Example
Let me give an example of how social languages and Discourses work together, 
The data below is a project where university academics and middle-school 
teachers worked together to discuss and build a curriculum around school 
children doing history (especially oral history, collecting oral stories) in their own 
communities. The group had just had a long and contentious meeting in which 
there was conflict between the university historian on the project and some of 
the teachers. The conflict had involved the claim that the historian had failed to 
consult with the teachers sufficiently in plans she had made for the project.
 The meeting is over at the point the data below starts and only a few 
people are left. Two teachers, Karen and Jane, and Joe, an administrator from 
a school involved in the project, and Sara, the university historian, are still 
present. They are now engaging in “small talk”—no longer talking about the 
project—before themselves leaving.
 Karen, Jane, and Joe were all born in the town where the project took 
place, a town we will call Middleview (all names have been changed). So were 
their parents. Middleview is a largely working-class town that was suffering 
at the time with the loss of many industrial jobs. Sara was born and educated 
elsewhere and was a professor at a local prestigious private university. She was 
not born in Middleview and did not plan to stay there for her whole career. 
 There had been much tension in project meetings between how teachers 
talk and think about issues and how university professors do. That is, there 
had been tensions between the teachers’ Discourse as teachers in Middleview 
and the professors’ Discourse as university academics.
 Here is the data (The symbols “/” and “//” will be explained in the next 
chapter—you can ignore them for now):
Karen: 
 1. My mother used to talk about in the 40s /
 2 You’d hang around at Union Station /
 3. And anybody would just pick you up / 
 4. Because everybody was going down to dance at Bright City /
 5. Whether you knew them or not //
 110 Context
Joe:
 6. Lakeside Ballroom //
Jane: 
 7. Yeah definitely //
Joe: 
 8. My father used to work there //
Jane:
 9. And also, once you finally get into the war situation /
10. Because you have Fort Derby /
11. Everybody would get a ride in to come to Bright City /
12. To the amusement park //
13. So it was this influx of two, three cars’ worth of guys /
14. That were now available to meet the girls that suddenly were there //
Sara: 
15. Well actually street, street cars had just come in in this /
16. And as I recall um from a student who wrote a paper on this /
17. Bright City and Park was built by the street car company /
18. In order to have it a sort of target destination for people to go to /
19. And to symbiotically make money off of this //
Jane: 
20. Because once you got there /
21. You could take a boat ride /
22. And go up and down a lake /
23. And there were lots of other ways to get the money from people // 
 Here the Middleview teachers and the administrator are no longer speaking 
as (no longer using a social language associated with) teachers or adminis-
trators—no longer speaking as school people—but now they are speaking as 
(using a social language associated with) “everyday people” and long-term 
residents and citizens of Middleview. They are engaged in the practice 
of using “small talk” to bond over their shared backgrounds, identities, 
and values. They are speaking out of their “life world Discourses” (their 
identity as “everyday people” not specialists of any sort, not, for example, 
 Context 111
as educators). They are also speaking out of their Discourse as long-term 
Middleview residents and citizens.
 Here are some things you do not know about the ways of thinking and 
valuing typical of Middleview Discourse, but things that will make the talk 
above more meaningful. Long-term residents of Middleview are the products 
of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration from Europe. They 
value their shared history as part of Middleview and see places where all the 
citizens of Middleview used to congregate as central to the identity of the 
town. They are concerned today, faced with new immigration from South 
America, Asia, and the West Indies, as well as economic problems, that there 
are no such central congregating places anymore, in part because people tend 
to stay in their own neighborhoods and the central district has deteriorated.
 The Middleview school people are interacting within their shared 
Middleview Discourse as a way of bonding, using the social language of 
“small talk” about shared stories of the past they have heard from their 
relatives. Their Discourse is, of course, more than just ways of talking, but 
also ways of acting, interacting, thinking, valuing, and knowing about and 
using the geography of their town.
 Sara, the university professor, cannot enter the Middleview Discourse. She 
is not a long-term resident of Middleview and does not view the town the 
way they do. She has no relevant stories to share. At the same time, she wants 
to engage in their bonding through small talk, especially since there has just 
been conflict in terms of their professional Discourses. Sara, however, mixes 
“everyday language” and her professional language as an academic (two 
different social languages). She also mixes two different Discourses, her life 
world Discourse as an “everyday person” and her historian Discourse.
 Examples of “academic language” mixed into “everyday” talk are: “in order 
to,” “target destination,” and “symbiotically.” An example of mixing academic 
Discourse into an “everyday person” life world Discourse is the move of 
using a student paper as evidence. This is something academic historians do. 
However, the Middleview Discourse people are using shared stories from their 
parents and grandparents as evidence, not research papers—the fact that they 
can use such evidence is part of what lets others recognize them as members 
of the MiddleviewDiscourse. So Sara has set up a possible conflict again. On 
the other hand, she has no other way to participate in the bonding here.
 However, Jane incorporates Sara’s comment nicely. She engages in the 
typical Middleview talk that has been going on as a form of bonding, but 
closes on “money” as a way to tie back to and incorporate Sara’s point. 
 It is an irony, perhaps, that Sara was seeking to get the teachers to engage 
in and value oral history with their students. Here the long-term Middleview 
residents are sharing oral history stories to mark their identity as fellow 
members of the Middleview Discourse, but Sara seeks to have written evidence 
(a research paper) “trump” oral stories as evidence. This, by the way, is also a 
good example of Building Task 7, privileging one form of knowing over another.
 112 Context
 The data above is an intricate play between ways of being (identities, 
Discourses) and ways with words (styles of language, social language) within 
the common practice (activity) of “small talk” after an official meeting. The 
tensions in this small talk may go some way to explaining tensions in the 
formal meetings, which overlaid professional Discourse differences (teachers, 
university academics) over the tensions between “real” Middleview citizens 
and newcomers (like Sara or, for that matter, the new “brown” immigrants).
Intertextuality and Conversations
In society Discourses (“kinds of people,” people enacting different identities) 
“talk” to each other, not just individuals. When a Los Angeles policeman is 
talking as a policeman to a street-gang member as a street-gang member it 
is not just two people interacting, but the Discourse of L.A. policemen and 
the Discourse of gang members (and there are different gang Discourses 
based on ethnic groups and neighborhoods). This “dialogue” has been 
going on a long time. It started before the current encounter and will last 
beyond it. Furthermore, the current encounter is deeply influenced by past 
interactions between these two Discourses. So, too, with the long-running 
interactions between biologists and creationists, liberals and conservatives, 
and cattle ranchers and environmentalists in the American West, to take just 
a few examples of conflicting Discourses. Sometimes, Discourses interact 
in complicity with each other, not in conflict. For example, there is, in the 
United States, a good deal of complicity (though sometimes some tension 
too) between a far-right conservative Discourse and certain fundamentalist 
Christian Discourses.
 Intertextuality and Conversations (big “C” Conversations), two of our 
tools of inquiry, are centrally about the interaction of Discourses in society. 
Intertextuality is about mixing together or juxtaposing different social 
languages, often connected to different Discourses, in various ways. Two 
styles of language come to interact (with complicity or tension) with each 
other in the same “text” (stretch of speech or writing).
 Conversations are public debates, arguments, motifs, issues, or themes that 
large numbers of people in a society or social group know about. When I use 
“Conversations,” with a capital “C,” I am speaking metaphorically as if the 
various sides in debates around issues like abortion or smoking were engaged 
in one big grand conversation (or debate or argument, whatever we want to 
call it). Of course, this big Conversation is composed of a myriad of interac-
tional events taking place among specific people at specific times and places. 
The key point is that people know what the different “sides” or “poles” are in 
such Conversations, even if they only agree with one side.
 The interactions of Discourses in society give rise to intertextuality 
and Conversations when the traces of their interactions show up in our 
talk and writing. Indeed, intertextuality is often a textual reflex or trace of 
 Context 113
Conversations among Discourses in a society. Conversations that are widely 
known in a society or social group are often assumed to be known (and 
taken as part of the potentially relevant part of the context) by anyone who is 
engaged as a listener or reader in that society or social group. 
An Example
In a delightful paper entitled “The Ontological Status of Burritos” (2008, unpub-
lished paper), Richard Ruiz, a sociolinguist and anthropological linguist at the 
University of Arizona, has this to say (I have bolded terms I will discuss below):
In fact, many Mexicans in my circle would say that “taco” is metaphorical (actually 
metonymic—the Mexicans I know tend to be precise in their use of classical root-
words), an icon that stands for much more than a piece of food. Vamos a echarnos un 
taco, literally “let’s go throw a taco on ourselves,” means something like “let’s do lunch” 
or, more liturgically, “let us break bread together.” Here, no one is really talking about 
bread. It is a way of indicating an interest in establishing or reinforcing a friendship 
beyond whatever formal roles the participants may be playing. In this, “taco” may 
be socio-linguistically unique; you don’t hear people inviting someone to throw an 
enchilada or tamale (sic) on each other, thankfully. (If they did, I imagine it would be 
taken as an invitation to some sort of kinky Mexican duel—but that would be different.)
Ruiz incorporates into his text a number of terms that make reference to 
different Discourses. The terms “metaphorical,” “metonymic,” “classical 
root-words,” and “sociolinguistically” come from the Discourse of linguistics. 
“Vamos a echarnos un taco,” of course, mixes Spanish with English. “Let’s do 
lunch” comes from “business talk.” “Let us break bread together” comes from 
religious Discourse. Finally, “kinky” references “sex talk” of a sort that occurs 
in a number of different Discourses concerned with sex.
 So within Ruiz’s text—written primarily in a conversational, though literary 
form—snatches of language associated with different Discourses are intermixed 
with his basic conversational style in the essay. Each such intertextual reference 
has a purpose. The links to linguistics are there because eventually Ruiz uses 
his knowledge as a linguist to give both his personal (cultural) and professional 
opinion about a court case where the issue at stake was whether a burrito is a 
sandwich. The link to Spanish is there because one of the issues in the essay 
is the role of different language and cultures in American society. The links 
to business, religion, and sex are there to serve as “translations” of culturally 
specific practices and terms (e.g., “taco” as Ruiz’s friends used the terms, “Vamos 
a echarnos un taco”) for readers unfamiliar with these practices and terms.
 From this passage alone, the role of Conversations in this text may not be 
apparent. But consider the following passage from Ruiz’s essay:
It is not new that judges and courts decide questions for which their background 
may be deemed inadequate. Some of these decisions are much more important 
 114 Context
than resolving the ontological status of burritos. In 1896, a court decided that a 
law requiring Black and white people to use separate public facilities was constitu-
tional; the plaintiff was Homer Plessy, a man who was one-eighth Black. In 1927, in 
a test case challenging the Plessy decision in the area of school segregation, a court 
decided that a Chinese girl was legally black (actually “negro,” the term of the 
day). In 1954, a court in Texas declared that Mexican Americans were Caucasians. 
(I now know the cause of the brief bout of cold shivers resulting from the chemical 
reorganization I went through when I became white as a young boy.) In retrospect, 
many of us would now agree that the judges had no special qualification to decide 
these questions, and that they were just wrong to boot.
 Ruiz is using a court case about whether burritos are sandwiches (a 
sandwich chain in a mall wanted to keep a burrito restaurant out of the mall 
sincethey had a legal agreement with the mall that no other sandwich restau-
rants could set up shop in the mall) to make a much larger point about judges 
making decisions on issues about which they are culturally incompetent or 
culturally blind.
 In the U.S. there has been a longstanding Conversation, which has gone 
on for a long time in many places over many specific issues, as to whether 
justice should be “blind” or whether judges should use their distinctive 
cultural knowledge or seek out such knowledge if they do not have it. 
This Conversation (debate) intersects today in the United States with the 
Conversations (debates) about the growing role of Spanish and Mexican 
culture in the United States. Though Ruiz wrote his essay before Sonia 
Sotomayor (the first Hispanic judge appointed to the U. S. Supreme Court) 
was nominated to the Supreme Court, her nomination energized both 
these Conversations (were one historical instance of these long-running 
Conversations). These Conversations are a relevant part of the context 
of Ruiz’s essay, though he does not mention them explicitly, but assumes 
them.
 It should be clear from this example how intertextuality (different styles 
of language associated with different Discourses mixing in a text or being 
juxtaposed in a text) and Conversations (public debates whose sides or poles 
are widely known) are ways in which the interactions of Discourses show up 
in our talk and writing.
Readings
Cocker, M (2001). Birders: Tales of a tribe. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[An introduction to linguistic anthropology that uses a good deal of discourse 
analysis and contains good discussions of the role of context]
Duranti, A. & Goodwin, C., Eds. (1992). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive 
phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Important articles that 
reflect the current view of language and context as reflexively related and context 
as socially negotiated through interaction]
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
 Context 115
[A book about how listeners use “contextualization cues” to build interpretations, 
by a leading twentieth-century anthropologist linguist]
Gumperz, J. J., Ed. (1982). Language and social identity. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press. [An important and still timely collection on language and identity 
as constructed in and through social interaction]
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations of sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of 
Pennsylvania Press. [A classic and foundational book on language as a cultural 
competence]
Van Dijk, T. A. (2009). Society and discourse: How social contexts influence text and talk. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A good discussion of the role of context 
in interpretation]
CHAPTER EIGHT
Discourse Analysis
■■ Transcription  117
■■ An “Ideal” Discourse Analysis  121
■■ Validity  122
■■ Starting to do Discourse Analyses  124
 Discourse Analysis 117
Transcription
In this chapter I first discuss the nature of transcriptions of data for our 
discourse analyses, a topic about which I will say more in Chapter 9. Next I 
turn to what an “ideal” discourse analysis would look like and argue that any 
real discourse analysis is always just a partial realization of this ideal. Finally, 
I discuss what constitutes validity for a discourse analysis. We start in this 
section with transcription.
 With ever more sophisticated recording and computer equipment, it is 
possible to get incredibly detailed records of speech that include small pauses, 
slight hesitations, subtle changes in sound, pitch, rate, and loudness, as well 
as close synchronizations of overlaps between speakers. It is tempting to 
believe that such detailed records represent some pure, objective, and unana-
lyzed “reality.” In fact, they do no such thing. Speech always has far more 
detail in it than any recording or transcription system could ever capture (or 
that the human ear can hear).
 A discourse analysis is based on the details of speech (and gaze and gesture 
and action) or writing that are arguably deemed relevant in the context and 
that are relevant to the arguments the analysis is attempting to make. A 
discourse analysis is not based on all the physical features present, not even 
on all those that might, in some conceivable context, be meaningful, or 
might be meaningful in analyses with different purposes. Such judgments 
of relevance (what goes into a transcript and what does not) are ultimately 
theoretical judgments, that is, they are based on the analyst’s theories of 
how language, contexts, and interactions work in general and in the specific 
context being analyzed. In this sense, a transcript is a theoretical entity. It 
does not stand outside an analysis, but, rather, is part of it.
 Any speech data can be transcribed in more or less detailed ways such that 
we get a continuum of possible transcripts ranging from very detailed (what 
linguists call “narrow”) transcripts to much less detailed (what linguists call 
“broad”) ones. While it is certainly wise to begin one’s analysis by transcribing 
for more detail than may in the end be relevant, ultimately it is the purposes 
of the analyst that determine how narrow or broad the transcript must be. The 
validity of an analysis is not a matter of how detailed one’s transcript is. It is 
a matter of how the transcript works together with all the other elements of 
the analysis to create a “trustworthy” analysis.
 There is not space here to go into the linguistic details of transcripts. 
Instead, I will simply give one example of how “minor” details can take on 
“major” importance in interaction, and, thus, must, in those instances, be 
included in transcripts. Consider the interaction below between an Anglo-
American female researcher (“R”) and a fourth-grade African-American girl 
(“S” for student) with whom the researcher is discussing light as part of a 
school science education project. This student comes from a very poor home 
and her schooling has been continuously disrupted by having to move in 
 118 Discourse Analysis
order to find housing. The researcher is about to start an interaction with the 
student in which the student will be asked to reason about light by manipu-
lating and thinking about a light box and how a light beam focused by the 
box interacts with different plastic shapes, including a prism (which causes 
the light to break into a rainbow of colors).
 The following transcript uses notational devices to name features of 
speech which we have not yet discussed, but which we will discuss in the 
next chapter (Chapter 9). For now, it is enough to know that each line of 
the transcript represents a “tone unit,” that is, a set of words said with one 
uniform intonational contour (that is, they are said as if they “go together”—
see Chapter 9). A double slash (“//”) indicates that the tone unit is said with 
a “final contour,” that is, a rising or falling pitch of the voice that sounds 
“final,” as if a piece of information is “closed off” and “finished” (the fall or 
rise in pitch is realized over the underlined words and any words that follow 
them). A tone unit that has no double slash is said on a “non-final contour,” 
a shorter rising or falling contour that sounds as if there is more information 
to come. 
 I have organized the text below into “stanzas,” a language unit that we 
will discuss in Chapter 9. Stanzas are “clumps” of tone units that deal with 
a unitary topic or perspective, and which appear (from various linguistic 
details) to have been planned together. In this case, the stanzas are interac-
tively produced. Words that are underlined carry the major stress in their tone 
unit (as we will see in Chapter 9, stress in English is marked by bumping or 
gliding the pitch of the voice up or down or increasing loudness or both). 
Capitalized words are emphatic(said with extra stress). Two periods (“..”) 
indicates a hearable pause. Two dots following a vowel (“die:d”) indicate that 
the vowel is elongated (drawn out). “Low pitch” means that the preceding 
unit was said on overall low pitch. This transcript is certainly nowhere as 
narrow as it could be, though it includes some degree of linguistic detail.
STANZA 1
 1. R: Where does the light come from
 2. R: when it’s outside? //
 3. S: Sun (low pitch) //
 4. R: From the sun (low pitch) // .. hum
STANZA 2
 5. S: Cause the sun comes up
 6. S: REALLY early //
 7. R: um .. And that’s when we get light (low pitch) //
STANZA 3
 8. S: And that’s how the, the the me .. my .. me and my class
 9. S: is talkin’ about dinosau:rs
10. S: and how they die:d // 
 Discourse Analysis 119
11. S: And we found out ..
12. S: some things . about how they die:d //
13. R: Oh really // 
Start of STANZA 4
14. R: Does that have to do with LIGHT? //
(interaction continues)
 After a long interaction of which the above data is but a part, the researcher 
felt that the child often went off topic and was difficult to understand. However, 
it can be argued, from the above data, that the researcher “co-constructed” 
(contributed to) these topic changes and lack of understanding. 
 Children in school are used to a distinctive school activity in which an 
adult asks them a question (to which the adult already knows the answer, but 
to which the answer is not supposed to be obvious), the child answers, and 
the adult responds in some way that can be taken as evaluating whether the 
child’s answer was “acceptable” or not. 
 There is also a common and related practice in schools in which the 
teacher asks one or more obvious and rather “everyday” questions in order 
to elicit items that will subsequently be treated in much more abstract ways 
than they typically are in “everyday” (life world) interaction. A science 
teacher might ask “What is this?” of a ruler. Receiving the answer “a ruler,” 
she might ask “What do we do with rulers?” Having elicited an answer like 
“measure things,” the teacher may very well go on to treat measuring devices 
and measurement in quite abstract ways. 
 In the interaction above, the researcher appears to want to elicit some 
everyday information about light in order to subsequently get the child to treat 
light in terms of abstract notions like “light sources,” “directions,” “reflection,” 
and “refraction,” that is, much more abstractly than specific things like the 
sun. There is ample evidence from what we otherwise know about the student 
being discussed here that she is, in all likelihood, unfamiliar with and unprac-
ticed in this sort of (on the face of it rather odd) school-based practice.
 In the above interaction, the researcher starts with a question to which the 
student responds with the word “sun” said on a low pitch and with a final 
falling contour. This way of answering indicates (in many dialects of English) 
that the respondent takes the answer to be obvious (this already constitutes a 
problem with the question-answer-evaluation activity). 
 The researcher’s response is said in exactly the same way as the child’s (low 
pitch, final falling contour)—and in just the position that a student is liable to 
expect an evaluation—indicating that she, too, takes the answer to be obvious. 
The student might well be mystified, then, as to why the question was asked. 
 In 5 and 6 the student adds tone units that are said on a higher pitch than 
the previous ones. Furthermore, line 6 contains an emphatic “really.” This 
way of saying 5 and 6 indicates that the student takes this information to be 
 120 Discourse Analysis
new or significant information. She may well have added this information in 
a search for some response that would render the initial question something 
other than an request for obvious information and in a search for some more 
energetic response from the researcher, one that would let the student know 
she was “on the right tract” in the interaction. 
 However, the student once again gets a response from the researcher (low 
pitch, falling final contour) that indicates the researcher takes the student’s 
contribution, again, to be obvious. The student, then, in 8, launches off on 
yet another contribution that is, once again, said in a way that indicates she 
is trying to state new or significant information that will draw a response of 
interest from the researcher. 
 The student also here uses a technique that is common to some African-
American children (Gee 2007). She states background information first (in 
stanza 3) before getting to her main topic (light), though her “found out / 
some things” clearly implies, in this context, that these things will eventually 
have to do with light (which they, indeed, do—she has studied how a meteor 
blocked out sunlight and helped destroy the dinosaurs). The researcher, 
listening for a more foregrounded connection to light, stops the student 
and, with emphasis on “light,” clearly indicates that she is skeptical that the 
student’s contribution is going to be about light, a skepticism that is, from the 
student’s perspective, not only unmerited, but actually surprising and a bit 
insulting (as subsequent interaction shows).
 Here the “devil” is, indeed, in the details: aspects of the school-based 
“known question-answer-evaluation” activity, different assumptions about 
how information is introduced and connected, as well as details of pitch and 
emphasis (as well as a good many other such details), all work together to lead 
to misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is quite consequential when the 
adult authority figure attributes the misunderstanding to the student and 
not to the details of language and diversity (most certainly including the 
researcher’s own language and diversity). 
 One may wonder why the researcher asked the questions she did and 
responded as she did. To make a long story short, the research project 
was based on the idea that giving children too much explicit information 
or overtly challenging responses would restrict their creativity and “sense 
making,” especially with minority students who may not interpret such overt 
instruction and challenging the same way the instructor does. Ironically, a 
situation set up to elicit the “best” from the child by leaving her as “free” as 
possible, led to her being constructed as not making sense, when, in fact, she 
was making sense at several levels in a deeply paradoxical setting created by 
the researchers.
 Note, then, too, how the details of the transcript are rendered relevant in 
the analysis and how the transcript is as detailed as it needs to be, no more, 
no less (other details in the transcript could well have been brought into the 
analysis). Of course, it is always open to a critic to claim that details we have 
 Discourse Analysis 121
left out are relevant. But some details will always have to be left out (e.g., 
Should we mark just how much vowels are adapted to final consonants? Just 
how much pitch declines across a tone unit?) and, thus, such a criticism 
cannot mean that we must attempt to put in all the details. The burden simply 
falls on the critic to show that details we have left out are relevant by adding 
them in and changing the analysis (thus, discourse analysts must always be 
willing to share their data).
An “Ideal” Discourse Analysis
Before discussing, in the next section, what constitutes validity for a discourse 
analysis, let me summarize the components of an “ideal” discourse analysis. 
Actual analyses, of course, usually develop in detail only a small part of the 
full picture. However, any discourse analysis needs, at least, to give some 
consideration, if only as background, to the whole picture. 
 Essentially a discourse analysis involves asking questions about how 
language, at a given time and place, is used to engage in the seven building 
tasks we have discussed earlier. The tools of inquiry we have introducedare 
meant to constitute six areas where the analyst can ask such questions. These 
tools are: situated meanings, social languages, figured worlds, intertextuality, 
Discourses, and Conversations. 
 We have seven building tasks and six tools of inquiry. A discourse analysis 
uses each of the tools of inquiry to ask questions about each building task. This 
means we have six questions to ask about seven things, a total of 42 questions 
(each of which is a “big question” that can lead to other sub-questions):
1. Building Task 1: Significance: How are situated meanings, social languages, 
figured worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to build 
relevance or significance for things and people in context?
2. Building Task 2: Practices (Activities): How are situated meanings, social languages, 
figured worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to enact a 
practice (activity) or practices (activities) in context?
3. Building Task 3: Identities: How are situated meanings, social languages, figured 
worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to enact and 
depict identities (socially significant kinds of people)?
4. Building Task 4: Relationships: How are situated meanings, social languages, 
figured worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to build 
and sustain (or change or destroy) social relationships?
5. Building Task 5: Politics: How are situated meanings, social languages, figured 
worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to create, 
distribute, or withhold social goods or to construe particular distributions of social 
goods as “good” or “acceptable” or not?
6. Building Task 6: Connections: How are situated meanings, social languages, figured 
worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to make things 
and people connected or relevant to each other or irrelevant to or disconnected 
from each other?
 122 Discourse Analysis
7. Building Task 7: Sign Systems and Knowledge: How are situated meanings, social 
languages, figured worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being 
used to privilege or disprivilege different sign systems (language, social languages, 
other sorts of symbol systems) and ways of knowing?
 In earlier chapters I have suggested various sub-questions one can ask 
about each of our tools of inquiry. So we have 42 large questions we can ask 
about any piece of data and sub-questions within each of these. Asking and 
answering these 42 questions about any one piece of data would lead to a 
very long analysis indeed. But that is what would constitute a “full” or “ideal” 
discourse analysis. For the most part, any real discourse analysis deals only 
with some of the questions. Nonetheless, analysts should be aware that the 
remaining questions still serve as an unfinished background to the analysis 
and it is fair game for any critic to raise one or more of them in questioning 
the validity of our analyses, which may mean we have to do more work.
Validity
I have held off until now discussing the question of what constitutes validity 
for a discourse analysis. This question could not be answered until enough of 
the “tools of inquiry” used in a discourse analysis had been laid out. However, 
now we are ready to deal with the issue of validity, an issue that has contin-
ually vexed so-called “qualitative research.”
 Validity is not constituted by arguing that a discourse analysis “reflects 
reality” in any simple way. This is so for at least two reasons. First, humans 
interpret the world, they do not have access to it “just as it is.” They must use 
some language or some other symbol system with which to interpret it and 
thereby render it meaningful in certain ways. A discourse analysis is itself an 
interpretation, an interpretation of the interpretive work people have done in 
specific contexts. It is, in that sense, an interpretation of an interpretation. 
 These two considerations do not mean that discourse analyses are 
“subjective,” that they are just the analyst’s “opinion.” I take validity to be 
something that different analyses can have more or less of, that is, some 
analyses are more or less valid than others. Furthermore, validity is never 
“once and for all.” All analyses are open to further discussion and dispute, 
and their status can go up or down with time as work goes on in the field.
 The 42 questions we have discussed above—the six questions based on 
our six tools of inquiry that we can ask about each of the seven building 
tasks—play a crucial role in my definition of validity for discourse analysis 
to be given below. A discourse analysis—as any empirical inquiry—is built 
around making arguments for a specific claim (or claims) or hypothesis (or 
hypotheses). The claim or hypothesis is the point of the analysis. 
 An example of such a claim would be something like: Conflict in meetings 
between teachers and university academics in my data (or research project) 
 Discourse Analysis 123
was caused by unacknowledged tensions between their different Discourses. 
Since Discourses involve situating meanings in certain ways, figured worlds 
of certain kinds, social languages of certain sorts, engagement with certain 
societal Conversations (debates with other Discourses), and, perhaps, various 
distinctive uses of intertextuality (i.e., all our other tools of inquiry), this 
claim or hypothesis will potentially involve all our tools of inquiry. The data 
we collect will show us some or all of the seven building tasks at work. We 
support the claim or hypothesis by showing how our tools of inquiry display 
these building tasks at work in ways that support our claim or hypothesis.
 Each tool of inquiry is linked to all the others both in what people do with 
language in specific contexts and in our analyses. Just as Discourses involve 
all the other tools, so, too, for figured worlds, or any of the other six tools. 
Any claim or hypothesis about figured worlds, for example, will potentially 
involve us in looking at Discourses, situated meanings, social language, 
Conversations, and intertextuality.
 Validity for any discourse analysis is constituted (made) by four elements. 
These are:
1. Convergence: A discourse analysis is more, rather than less valid (i.e., 
“trustworthy”), the more the answers to the 42 questions converge in the 
way they support the analysis or, to put the matter the other way round, 
the more the analysis offers compatible and convincing answers to many or 
all of them. 
2. Agreement: Answers to the 42 questions above are more convincing the 
more “native speakers” of the social languages in the data and “members” 
of the Discourses implicated in the data agree that the analysis reflects 
how such social languages actually can function in such settings. The 
native speakers do not need to know why or how their social languages 
so function, just that they can. Answers to the 42 questions are more 
convincing the more other discourse analysts (who accept our basic 
theoretical assumptions and tools), or other sorts of researchers (e.g., 
ethnographic researchers), tend to support our conclusions.
3. Coverage: The analysis is more valid the more it can be applied to related 
sorts of data. This includes being able to make sense of what has come 
before and after the situation being analyzed and being able to predict the 
sorts of things that might happen in related sorts of situations.
4. Linguistic Details: The analysis is more valid the more it is tightly tied 
to details of linguistic structure. All human languages have evolved, 
biologically and culturally, to serve an array of different communi-
cative functions. For this reason, the grammar of any social language 
is composed of specific forms that are “designed” to carry out specific 
functions, though any form can usually carry out more than one function. 
Part of what makes a discourse analysis valid, then, is thatthe analyst is 
able to argue that the communicative functions being uncovered in the 
 124 Discourse Analysis
analysis are linked to grammatical devices that manifestly can and do 
serve these functions, according to the judgments of “native speakers” of 
the social languages involved and the analyses of linguists (see Chapter 5 
on form–function correlations).
 Why does this constitute validity? Because it is highly improbable that a good 
many answers to 42 different questions, the perspectives of different “inside” and 
“outside” observers, additional data sets, and the judgments of “native speakers” 
and/or linguists will converge unless there is good reason to trust the analysis. 
This, of course, does not mean the analysis is true or correct in every respect. 
Empirical science is social and accumulative in that investigators build on each 
other’s work in ways that, in the long run, we hope, improves it. It does mean, 
however, that a “valid” analysis explains things that any future investigation of 
the same data, or related data, will have to take seriously into account.
 Validity is social, not individual. A given piece of discourse work will 
have a major point or theme, or a small set of them. These are the work’s 
hypotheses. Authors will normally argue for the validity of their analyses by 
arguing that some aspects of convergence, agreement, coverage, and linguistic 
details are met in their analysis. But no piece of work can, or should, ask all 
possible questions, seek all possible sources of agreement, cover all the data 
conceivably related to the data under analysis, or seek to deal with every 
possibly relevant linguistic detail. 
 A discourse analysis argues that certain data supports a given theme or 
point (hypothesis). In many cases, for the individual piece of work, conver-
gence and linguistic details are the most immediately important aspect of 
validity—that is, showing that answers to a number of questions like our 
42 questions above and linguistic details converge to support the analysis. 
It is important, as well, that these questions come from a consideration of 
different building tasks, and not just one, and that a number of different 
linguistic details support the conclusions drawn. It is important, too, that 
the researcher openly acknowledges if any answers to these questions or any 
linguistic details support opposing conclusions. Various aspects of agreement 
and coverage are also important in different ways in different sorts of studies 
(sometimes through citations to, and discussion of, the literature).
 The individual piece of work is, then, of course juxtaposed with earlier 
and later work in the field. This juxtaposition allows further aspects of 
convergence, agreement, coverage, and linguistics to be socially judged and 
adjudicated. Validity is as much, or more, in those social judgments and 
adjudications as it is in an individual piece of work.
Starting to do Discourse Analyses
In the next chapter I will deal with some aspects of how language is planned 
and produced and with some ways that a discourse analyst can start to 
 Discourse Analysis 125
organize his or her thinking about a piece of language. In Chapters 10–12 
I turn to examples of discourse analysis. It is here that my warning in the 
Introduction to this book must be most heeded: the method I have developed 
in this book is not intended as a set of “rules” to be followed “step-by-step.” 
In turn, the examples in Chapters 10–12 are not meant as “recipes” or “how 
to” manuals. Rather, they are meant merely to show some of the tools we have 
discussed in this book put to use, not in and for themselves, but to speak to 
particular themes, points, and issues. These examples, then, are meant as 
“thinking devices” to encourage others to engage in their own discourse-
related reflections. Many other examples could have been used, and other 
examples would have used the tools in somewhat different ways.
 What I would suggest for “beginners” who are pursuing their first 
discourse analyses is this: Pick a piece of data (a big or small interaction, 
narrative or other extended piece of language, an interview, or a written text, 
for example) that both interests you and that you believe will speak to or 
illuminate an important issue or question. If the data is speech, transcribe it 
as closely as you can, but with an eye to the features you think will be most 
important for the issue or question in which you are interested. Start with a 
reasonable amount of your data (you don’t need to use it all) and use more of 
it as the need arises (if it does).
 Pick some key words and phrases in the data, or related families of them, 
and ask what situated meanings these words and phrases seem to have in 
your data, given what you know about the overall context in which the data 
occurred. Think about what figured worlds these situated meanings appear 
to implicate. Think about the social languages and Discourses that appear to 
be relevant, in whatever ways, to your data. If it is easier to think about what 
Conversations (see Chapter 4) are relevant to your data, then do that. 
 As you think about social languages, Discourses, and Conversations, 
you are thinking about what and how social activities and socially situated 
identities are being enacted and/or recognized in your data (recognized by 
participants and/or yourself as analyst). As you think about all these things, 
look closely at your data, ask yourself what linguistic details appear to be 
important for how situated meanings, figured worlds, social activities, socially 
situated identities, social languages, and Discourses are being “designed,” 
enacted, or recognized in your data.
 After some initial reflections on these matters, or as a way to engage in these 
reflections, ask yourself the 42 questions (six tool of inquiry questions about 
each of our seven building tasks), taking notes and reflecting on your answers 
to these questions, guided by the theme or question with which you started, 
but paying attention to any others that seem to emerge. Pay particular attention 
to where answers to several different questions seem to converge on the same 
point or theme (whether or not these are related to the original theme, interest, 
or question that started you off). Some of the 42 may not be relevant or may 
not yield illuminating answers for the data you have picked. That is fine.
 126 Discourse Analysis
 As you think about the points or themes that emerge from asking the 42 
questions, either relate them to the theme or question with which you started 
or revise that theme or question. Then, organize your analysis so that the 
material you have developed (the answers to the questions you have asked 
about the building tasks and the reflections you have made on them) speaks 
to, argues for, and illuminates the final main point(s), theme(s), or issue(s) 
you have chosen to address in your work. 
 Be sure you appeal to a variety of linguistic details in your analysis and try 
to address different building tasks (and their related questions) to begin to 
achieve some degree of validity in regard to convergence. You can, if appro-
priate, try to extend your analysis to other parts of your data or new sources 
of related data (or to data in the literature) to begin to achieve some degree 
of validity in regard to coverage. You can use interviews with participants 
(keeping in mind that they are not always conscious of what they mean and 
do), citations from related literature, and collaboration with others to begin 
to achieve some degree of validity in regard to agreement.
Readings
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
[Contains a good and up-to-date discussion of transcription conventions and 
issues]
Edwards, J. A. & Lampert, M. D., Eds. (1993). Talking data: Transcription and coding 
in discourse research. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [Good discussion of transcription 
conventions]Gee, J. P. (2007). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in Discourses. Third Edition. 
London: Falmer. [Contains discussions of the language of African-American 
children and citations to the literature]
Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation analysis. Malden, MA: Polity Press. [A 
good introduction to the “CA” (“Conversational Analysis”) approach to discourse 
analysis, an approach based in sociology]
Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction, in G. H. 
Lerner, Ed. Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation. Amsterdam and 
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 13–31. [Jefferson has developed the best-known 
set of conventions for transcription used in “Conversational Analysis” (“CD”) 
approaches to discourse analysis]
Ochs, E. (1979). Transcription as theory, in E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin, Eds. Developmental 
pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 43–71. [Classic paper on the fact that 
decisions about what and how to transcribe are theoretical decisions]
Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D. & Hamilton, H. E., Eds. (2001). The handbook of discourse 
analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell [A good handbook with many articles repre-
senting different approaches to and areas in discourse analysis]
CHAPTER NINE
Processing and Organizing Language
■■ Speech is Produced in Small Spurts  128
■■ Function Words and Content Words  129
■■ Information  130
■■ Stress and Intonation  131
■■ Lines  134
■■ Stanzas  137
■■ Macrostructure  138
■■ Macro-lines  141
■■ How Meaning is “Carved Up”  145
 128 Processing and Organizing Language
Speech is Produced in Small Spurts
This chapter deals with a few aspects of how speech is produced and what 
this has to do with the sorts of meanings we speakers hope to convey and we 
hearers (always actively and creatively) try to “recover.” We will deal here 
with a few technical details about the structure of sentences and of discourse. 
However, these details are not important in and of themselves. What is 
important is that the discourse analyst looks for patterns and links within and 
across utterances in order to form hypotheses about how meaning is being 
constructed and organized. What grammatical terminology we choose to use is 
less important than the patterns we find and the hypotheses we form and test.
 Notions like “situated meanings,” “figured worlds,” and “Discourses” will 
take a back seat here. In this chapter we are primarily concerned with some 
initial ways into a text. We are concerned with ways in which the analyst 
can start to organize his or her thinking about a piece of language. Of course 
these initial insights must quickly lead to thinking about situated meanings, 
figured worlds, and Discourses. In turn, ideas about these will influence and, 
at times, change how the analyst thinks about the linguistic patterns in a text. 
Discourse analysis is a reciprocal and cyclical process in which we shuttle 
back and forth between the structure (form, design) of a piece of language 
and the situated meanings it is attempting to build about the world, identities, 
and relationships in a specific context.
 Thanks to the way the human brain and vocal system are built, speech, in 
all languages, is produced in small spurts. Unless we pay close attention, we 
don’t usually hear these little spurts, because the ear puts them together and 
gives us the illusion of speech being an unbroken and continuous stream. In 
English, these spurts are often, though not always, one “clause” long. 
 In a rough and ready way we can define a “clause” here as any verb and 
the elements that “cluster” with it. So in a sentence like “Mary left the party 
because she was tired,” we have two clauses, “Mary left the party” and 
“because she was tired.” The sentence “Mary left the party” contains only 
one clause. In a sentence like “Mary intended to leave the party,” we also 
have two clauses: “Mary intended” and “to leave the party” (where “Mary” is 
understood as the subject of “to leave”). Here the second clause (“to leave the 
party”) is embedded in the first clause (“Mary intended”) as the direct object 
of the verb “intend.” These two clauses are so tightly bound together that they 
would most often be said as a single spurt.
 In the example below, taken from a story told by a seven-year-old child, 
each spurt is one clause long, except 1b and 1e where the child has detached 
parts of clauses to be spurts on their own (of course, children’s speech units 
tend to be shorter than adults):
1a. there was a hook
1b. on the top of the stairway
 Processing and Organizing Language 129
1c. an’ my father was pickin me up
1d. an’ I got stuck on the hook
1e. up there
1f. an’ I hadn’t had breakfast
1g. he wouldn’t take me down
1h. until I finished all my breakfast
1i. cause I didn’t like oatmeal either
 To understand how these spurts work in English (they work differently in 
different languages), we need to discuss a set of closely interrelated linguistic 
concepts: function words, content words, information, stress, intonation, 
lines, and stanzas. We will start with the distinction between function words 
and content words.
Function Words and Content Words
Content words (sometimes also called “lexical words”) belong to the major 
parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These categories are said 
to be “open categories” in the sense that they each have a large number 
of members, and languages readily add new members to these categories 
through borrowing from other languages or the invention of new words.
 Function words (also sometimes called “grammatical words”) belong to 
smaller categories, categories which are said to be “closed categories” in the 
sense that each category has relatively few members, and languages are resistant 
to borrowing or inventing anew such words (though they sometimes do). Such 
categories as determiners (e.g., “the,” “a/n,” “this/that,” “these/those”—these 
are also sometimes called “articles”), pronouns (e.g., “he/him,” “she/her,” “it,” 
“himself,” “herself”), prepositions (e.g., “in,” “on,” “to,” “of”), and quantifiers 
(e.g., “some,” “many,” “all,” “none”) are function word categories.
 Function words show how the content words in a phrase, clause, or sentence 
relate to each other, or how pieces of information fit into the overall ongoing 
communication. For example, the definite determiner “the” signals that the 
information following it is already “known” to the speaker and hearer. Pronouns 
signal that their referents have been previously mentioned, or are readily identi-
fiable in the context of communication or on the basis of the speaker and hearer’s 
mutual knowledge. Prepositions link nouns and noun phrases to other words 
(e.g., in “lots of luck” of links luck to lots; in “ideas in my mind” in links my 
mind to ideas; and in “look at the girl” at links the girl to the verb look). I have 
not yet mentioned adverbs. Adverbs are messy and complicated. Very often they 
function in a way that is midway between a function word and a content word.
 Since function words show how content words relate to each other, they 
can help us make guesses about what categories (e.g., nouns or verbs) of 
content words accompany them and what these words mean. To see this 
consider the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky”:
 130 Processing and Organizing Language
Twas bryllyg, and the slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves;
And the mome raths outgrabe.
 I have underlined the function words. I have also underlined the plural 
affix (“es” and “s”) since it functions just like a function word, though it is 
not a separate word. In this poem, Carroll uses real English function words, 
but nonsense content words (how do we know they are content words? By 
how they are placed in relation to the function words). Despite the fact that 
half the “words” in this text are nonsense, any speaker of English can use 
the function words to unravel the grammarof the sentences and to make 
good guesses about what content word categories (noun, verb, adjective) the 
nonsense content words belong to. The speaker of English can even make 
some good guesses about what the nonsense words might mean or what they 
might refer to. Thus, we readily interpret the stanza as a description of an 
outdoor scene with creatures of various sorts frolicking or moving about.
Information
Since function words carry less of the real content of the communication 
(their job being to signal the grammar of the sentence), we can say that they 
tend to be informationally less salient than content words. While they are 
certainly helpful, they are often dispensable, as anyone who has written a 
telegram knows.
 Thus, let us make a distinction between two types of information in a 
sentence. First, information that is relatively new and relatively unpredictable 
I will call “informationally salient.” The actual specific meaning of any 
content word in a sentence is unpredictable without knowing exactly what 
the content word means. In the Carroll poem, we vaguely know that “toves” 
are probably active little animate creatures, but we have no idea what exactly 
they are. Thus, content words are usually informationally more salient than 
function words. 
 Second, information that is given, assumed already known, or predictable, 
I will call “informationally less salient.” Very often even if you have not heard 
a function word you could pretty well predict where it should have been and 
what word exactly it would have been. For example, if you heard “Boy has 
lots ideas,” you could predict that “the” is missing in front of “boy,” and “of” 
between “lots” and “ideas.” If, however, you heard “That man has lots of,” you 
could not predict what content word should come after “of.” Thus, function 
words are usually informationally less salient than content words.
 In general, then, the content word–function word distinction is a distinction 
between two types of information. However, beyond this gross dichotomy, the 
distinction between information that is more or less salient is one that can 
 Processing and Organizing Language 131
only be drawn in the actual context of communication. We turn to this matter 
now.
Stress and Intonation
Information saliency in English is marked by stress. In turn, the different 
stress patterns in a spurt of speech set up its intonational contour. To see what 
these terms mean, consider the little dialogue below:
1. Speaker A: Have you read any good books lately?
 Speaker B: Well, I read a shocking book recently. 
 [Goes on to describe the book]
 How speaker B crafts her response is partially set up by the remark made 
by speaker A, which here represents part of the context in which B’s response 
occurs. Let’s think a moment about how the sentence uttered by B might have 
been said. English speakers mark the information saliency of a word by how 
much stress they give the word. 
 Stress is a psychological concept, not a physical one. English speakers can 
(unconsciously) use and hear several different degrees of stress in a speech spurt, 
but this is not physically marked in any uniform and consistent way. Stress is 
physically marked by a combination of increased loudness, increased length, and 
by changing the pitch of one’s voice (raising or lowering the pitch, or gliding up 
or down in pitch) on a word’s primary (“accented”) syllable. Any one or two of 
these can be used to trade off for the others in a quite complicated way. 
 In any case, English speakers unconsciously use and recognize stress, and it 
can be brought to conscious awareness with a little practice (some people are 
better than others at bringing stress differences to consciousness awareness, 
though we can all unconsciously use and recognize it). A word with more 
stress than another word sounds more salient (it often sounds louder, though 
it may not really be louder, but just be longer or have a pitch change on it, 
both of which will make English speakers think it sounds louder).
 So let’s return to speaker B’s response and assume it was said as one spurt of 
speech. Its first word, “well,” can be said with little stress, on a relatively low 
pitch and/or with little loudness, since it carries no content, but simply links 
speaker B’s turn to speaker A’s. This is not to say that words like “well” are 
not important in other ways; such words, in fact, have interesting discourse 
functions in helping to link and package information across sentences. Since 
“well” is the first word of speaker B’s spurt of speech, and starts her turn, it 
will be said on a pitch that is taken to be close to the “basic pitch” at which 
speaker B will be speaking (perhaps, kicked up a bit from B’s basic pitch and, 
too, from where speaker A left off, to mark B’s turn as beginning).
 “I” is completely predictable in the context of the question speaker A has 
asked, and it is a function word. Thus, it is not very salient informationally and 
 132 Processing and Organizing Language
will receive little stress, just enough loudness to get it said and with a pitch close 
to the basic pitch speaker B has chosen (for this spurt or related run of spurts as 
she keeps speaking). The content word “read” is predictable because it has already 
occurred in speaker A’s preceding question. So, too, for the word “book” later in 
B’s remark. Both of these words will have a fairly low degree of stress. They will 
have more than the function words “well,” “I,” and “a,” since as content words 
they do carry content, but certainly much less than the word “shocking,” which 
carries new and non-redundant information. The indefinite article “a,” of course, 
is informationally very unsalient and will get little stress. The speaker will mark 
what stress words like “read” and “book” have by bumping the pitch of her voice 
a bit up or down from the “basic pitch” she has established or is establishing and/
or by increasing loudness a bit relative to words like “I” and “a.” 
 On the other hand, the word “shocking” is the most unpredictable, infor-
mationally salient, new information in the sentence. The speaker will mark 
this saliency by giving this word the most stress in the sentence. Such a 
word or phrase, which carries the greatest degree of stress in a sentence (or a 
given spurt of speech), is marked not just by bumping the pitch of the voice 
up or down a bit in pitch and/or by increasing loudness, but by a real pitch 
movement (called a “glide”). 
 The speaker begins to glide the pitch of her voice up or down (or even 
up-then-down or down-then-up) on the word “shocking,” allowing the pitch 
movement to continue to glide up or down (whichever she has chosen) on 
the words that follow it, here “book” and “recently.” Of course, what sort of 
pitch movement the speaker chooses, that is, whether up, down, up-then-
down, or down-then-up, has a meaning (for example, the speaker’s pitch glide 
rises in certain sorts of questions and falls in certain sorts of statements). We 
are not now concerned, however, with these meaning differences. 
 The pitch glide which begins on the word “shocking” marks “shocking” 
as the focus of the intonation unit. An “intonation unit” is all the words 
that precede a pitch glide and the words following it over which the glide 
continues to move (fall or rise). The next intonation unit begins when the 
glide is finished. The speaker often hesitates a bit between intonation units 
(usually we pay no attention to these hesitations) and then steps the pitch up 
or down a bit from the basic pitch of the last intonation unit on the first word 
of the next unit (regardless of whether it is a content word or not) to “key” 
the hearer that a new intonation unit is beginning.
 In B’s response to A, the content word “recently” is fairly redundant (not 
too salient) because, while it has not been mentioned in A’s question, it is 
certainly implied by A’s use of the word “lately.” Thus, it receivesabout as 
much stress, or, perhaps a little more, than the content words “read” and 
“book.” The speaker may increase her loudness a bit on “recently” and/or 
bump the pitch of her voice up or down a bit on its main syllable (i.e., “cent”) 
as her pitch continues basically to glide up or down over “recently” as part of 
(and the ending of) the pitch glide started on the word “shocking.”
 Processing and Organizing Language 133
 Below, I give a visual representation of how speaker B might have said her 
utterance:
 shock
 ing 
 read book cent
Well re
 I a ly
 There are, of course, other ways to have said this utterance, ways which 
carry other nuances of meaning. 
 There is one last important feature of English intonation to cover here. In 
English, if the intonation focus (the pitch glide) is placed on the last content 
word of a phrase (say on “flower” in the phrase “the pretty red flower”), then 
the salient, new information is taken to be either just this word or the material 
in the phrase as a whole (thus, either just “flower” or the whole phrase “the 
pretty red flower”). Of course, the context will usually determine which is 
the case. If the intonation focus (pitch glide) is placed on a word other than 
the last word in the phrase, then that word is unequivocally taken to be the 
salient, new information (e.g., if the intonation focus is on “red” in “the pretty 
red flower,” then the salient, new information is taken to be just “red”). In our 
example above, “shocking” is not the last word in its phrase (it is an adjective 
in a noun phrase “a shocking book”) and, thus, is unequivocally the new, 
salient information.
 An interesting situation arises when the intonation focus (pitch glide) is 
placed in the last (content) word in a sentence. Then, we cannot tell whether 
the salient, new information the speaker is trying to indicate is just that word 
or also other words that precede it and go with it in the phrase or phrases 
to which it belongs. So in an utterance like “This summer, Mary finished 
fifteen assigned books,” if the speaker starts her glide on “books,” the new 
salient information she intends to mark may be just “books” (answering a 
question like “Mary finished fifteen assigned whats?”), or “assigned books” 
(“Mary finished fifteen whats?”), or “fifteen assigned books” (“What has 
Mary finished?”), since “books” is part of the noun phrase “fifteen assigned 
books.” The new salient information could even be “finished fifteen assigned 
books,” since these words constitute together a verb phrase ending with, and 
containing, the word “book” (“What has Mary done?”). In fact, since “books” 
is the last word of the sentence, everything in the sentence could be taken 
to be new and salient (“What happened?”). Of course, in actual contexts it 
becomes clearer what is and what is not new and salient information. 
 Ultimately, the context in which an utterance is uttered, together with the 
assumptions that the speaker makes about the hearer’s knowledge, usually 
determines the degrees of informational saliency for each word and phrase in 
a sentence. Speakers, however, can also choose to downplay or play up the 
 134 Processing and Organizing Language
information saliency or importance of a word or phrase and ignore aspects of 
the context or what they assume the hearer to know and not know already. 
This is part of how speakers actively create or manipulate contexts, rather 
than just simply respond to them. Of course, if speakers take this too far, they 
can end up saying things that sound odd and “out of context.”
 In a given context, even a function word’s information might become 
important, and then the function word would have a greater degree of stress. 
For example, consider the context below:
2. A: Did Mary shoot her husband? 
 B: No, she shot YOUR husband!
 In this context, the information carried by “your” is unpredictable, new, 
and salient. Thus, it gets stressed (in fact, it gets extra stress because it is 
contrastive—yours not hers—and surprising). In fact, in 2B, given its context 
(2A), it will be the focus of the intonation unit. When speakers want to 
contrast or emphasize something, they can use extra stress (marked by more 
dramatic pitch changes and/or loudness)—this is sometimes called “emphatic 
stress.”
Lines
Each small spurt out of which speech is composed usually has one salient 
piece of new information in it that serves as the focus of the intonation 
contour on the spurt (e.g., “shocking” in 1 and “your” in 2 above). There 
is often a pause, slight hesitation, or slight break in tempo after each spurt.
 Speaking metaphorically, we can think of the mind as functioning like the 
eye (Chafe 1980, 1994). To take an example, consider a large piece of infor-
mation that I want to communicate to you, such as what happened on my 
summer vacation. This information is stored in my head (in my long-term 
memory). When I want to speak about my summer vacation, my “mind’s eye” 
(the active attention of my consciousness) can only focus on one small piece 
of the overall information about my summer vacation at a time. 
 Analogously, when my eye looks at a large scene, a landscape or a painting, 
for example, it can only focus or fixate on one fairly small piece of visual 
information at a time. The eye rapidly moves over the whole scene, stopping 
and starting here and there, one small focus or fixation at a time (watch 
someone’s eye as they look over a picture, a page of print, or at a scene in the 
world). The “mind’s eye” also focuses on one fairly small piece of information 
at a time, encodes it into language, and puts it out of the mouth as a small 
spurt of speech. Each small chunk in speech represents one such focus of the 
mind’s eye, and usually contains only one main piece of salient information. 
 Such chunks (what I have heretofore been referring to as “spurts”) 
have sometimes been called “idea units” when people want to stress their 
 Processing and Organizing Language 135
informational function and “tone units” when people want to stress their 
intonational properties. I will refer to them here, for reasons that will become 
apparent later, as “lines.”
 To see lines operating, consider the example below, taken from the opening 
of a story told by a seven-year-old African-American girl (we saw some of 
these lines at the outset of this chapter). Each line is numbered separately. 
Within each one, the word or phrase with the most stress and carrying the 
major pitch movement (i.e., the focus of the intonation contour), and which, 
thus, carries the new and most salient information, is underlined (in cases 
where more than one word is underlined, the last word in the phrase was 
where the pitch glide occurred and I am judging from context how much of 
the phrase is salient information):
3a. last yesterday
3b. when my father
3c. in the morning
3d. an’ he . . .
3e. there was a hook
3f. on the top of the stairway
3g. an’ my father was pickin’ me up 
 (“pick up” is verb 1 particle pair, a single lexical unit whose parts can 
be separated; the pitch glide starts on “pick”)
3h. an’ I got stuck on the hook
3i. up there
3j. an’ I hadn’t had breakfast
3k. he wouldn’t take me down
 (“take down” is also a verb 1 particle pair)
3l. until I finished all my breakfast
3m. cause I didn’t like oatmeal either
 Notice that each underlined word or phrase (minus its function words, 
which are necessary glue to hold the phrase together) contains new infor-
mation. The first line (3a above) tells us when the events of the story happened 
(in this child’s language “last yesterday” means “in the recent past”). The 
second line (3b) introduces the father, a major character in the story to follow. 
The third line (3c) tells us when the first event of the story (getting stuck on a 
hook) took place. The fourth line (3d) is a speech dysfluency showing us the 
child planning what to say (all speech has such dysfluencies). The fifth line(3e) introduces the hook; the sixth line (3f) tells us where the hook is. The 
seventh line (3g) introduces the action that leads to getting stuck. Thanks to 
having been mentioned previously in 3b, the father is now old information 
and thus “my father” in 3g has little stress. Therefore, “my father,” now being 
old information, can be part of the line “my father was pickin’ me up,” which 
contains only one piece of new information (the action of picking up). The 
 136 Processing and Organizing Language
eighth line (3h) gives the result of the previous one, that is, the result that the 
narrator gets stuck. 
 The rest of the lines work in the same way, that is, one salient piece of 
information at a time. Adults, of course, can have somewhat longer lines 
(thanks to their increased ability to encode the focuses of their consciousness 
into language), but not all that much longer.
 Notice, too, that once the child gets going and enough information has 
been built up (and thus, some of it has become old information), then each 
line tends to be one clause long. After line 3f all the lines are a single clause, 
except for 3i. And as the child continues beyond the point I have cited, more 
and more of her lines are a single clause. Most, but not all, lines in all speech 
are one clause long, though styles of speaking differ in interesting ways in this 
regard, with some styles having more single-clause lines than others.
 When readers read written texts, they have to “say” the sentences of the 
text in their “minds.” To do this, they must choose how to break them down 
into lines (which, thanks to the luxury of saying-in-the-mind, rather than 
having to actually produce and say them anew, can be somewhat longer 
than they would be in actual speech). Such choices are part of “imposing” 
a meaning (interpretation) on a text and different choices lead to different 
interpretations. Writers can, to a greater or lesser degree, try to guide this 
process, but they cannot completely determine it. 
 For example, consider the two sentences below, which I have taken at 
random from the beginning of a journal article. I have put slashes between 
where I, on my first “silent reading,” placed line boundaries: 
My topic is the social organization of remembering / in conversation. My particular 
concern is to examine / how people deal with experience of the past / as both 
individually and collectively relevant. (David Middleton, The social organization 
of conversational remembering: Experience as individual and collective concerns, 
Mind, Culture, and Activity, 4.2, 71–85, 1997, p. 71)
 I find myself treating “in conversation” as a separate line in the first 
sentence—perhaps, because remembering can be socially organized in many 
ways, of which conversation is but one, though the one in which Middleton 
is interested. The way in which I have parsed the second sentence above into 
lines treats Middleton’s main topic, announced in his first sentence (“the 
social organization of remembering in conversation,” and referred back to 
by “my particular concern [in this topic] is to examine”), as having two 
parts: “how people deal with experience of the past” (one line) and “as both 
individually and collectively relevant” (another line). That is, he is going to 
deal a) with memory and b) with memory as both an individual and collective 
phenomenon. Note that this bi-partite division is announced, as well, in the 
title of Middleton’s article, where the colon separates the two themes. Lines 
reflect the information structure of a text, whether that text is oral or written.
 Processing and Organizing Language 137
Stanzas
The information embraced within a single line of speech is, of course, most 
often too small to handle all that the speaker wants to say. It is necessary usually 
to let several focuses of consciousness (which lines represent) scan a body of 
information larger than a single focus. This is to say that the speaker has larger 
chunks than single focuses of consciousness in mind, and that several such 
focuses may constitute a single unitary larger block of information.
 Consider again the beginning of the young girl’s story in the last section. 
These focuses of consciousness (lines) constituted the opening or setting 
of her story, the background material one needs to know in order to situate 
and contextualize the main action of the story that follows. That is, these 
lines constitute a larger unitary block of information (the setting) within the 
story as a whole. However, within this block of information, there are smaller 
sub-blocks: the little girl devotes several lines to one topic (namely, getting 
stuck) and several other lines to another topic (namely, having breakfast). I 
will call such sets of lines devoted to a single topic, event, image, perspective, 
or theme a stanza.
 Below, I lay out the opening of the little girl’s story in terms of its lines and 
stanzas:
SETTING OF STORY:
STANZA 1 (getting stuck):
4a. last yesterday
4b. when my father
4c. in the morning
4d. an’ he . . .
4e. there was a hook
4f. on the top of the stairway
4g. an’ my father was pickin’ me up
4h. an’ I got stuck on the hook
4i. up there
STANZA 2 (having breakfast):
4j. an’ I hadn’t had breakfast
4k. he wouldn’t take me down
4l. until I finished all my breakfast
4m. cause I didn’t like oatmeal either 
 Each stanza is a group of lines about one important event, happening, or 
state of affairs at one time and place, or it focuses on a specific character, 
theme, image, topic, or perspective. When time, place, character, event, or 
perspective changes, we get a new stanza. I use this term (“stanza”) because 
these units are somewhat like stanzas in poetry. 
 Connected speech is like a set of boxes within boxes. The focuses of 
consciousness (lines), most of which are single clauses, are grouped together 
 138 Processing and Organizing Language
as one larger, unitary body of information, like the setting for a story. 
This larger body of information is itself composed of stanzas each one of 
which takes a single perspective on an event, state of affairs, or character. 
Presumably this distribution of information has something to do with how 
the information is stored in the speaker’s head, though speakers can actively 
make decisions about how to group or regroup information as they plan their 
speech.
Macrostructure
Larger pieces of information, like a story about my summer vacation, an 
argument for higher taxes, or a description of a plan for redistributing 
wealth, have their own characteristic, higher-level organizations. That is, 
such large bodies of information have characteristic parts much like the body 
has parts (the face, trunk, hands, legs, etc.). These parts are the largest parts 
out of which the body or the information is composed. They each have their 
own smaller parts (ultimately body parts are composed of skin, bones, and 
muscles, and the parts out of which a body of information is composed are 
ultimately composed themselves of stanzas and lines). The setting of the 
child’s story we have been discussing is a piece of the larger organization of 
her story. It is a “body part” of her story.
 Below, I reprint this child’s story as whole. Each larger “body part” 
of the story is numbered with a Roman numeral and labeled in bold 
capitals (SETTING, CATALYST, CRISIS, EVALUATION, RESOLUTION, and 
CODA). These larger “body parts” of the story as a whole can be called its 
“macrostructure,” as opposed to its lines and stanzas which constitute its 
“microstructure.”
 In order to see the patterning in the little girl’s story all the more clearly, I 
do something a bit different below in the way I represent lines and stanzas. I 
remove from the girl’s story the various sorts of speech hesitations and dysflu-
encies that are part and parcel of all speech (and that tell us something about 
how planning is going on in the speaker’s head). I also place the little girl’s 
lines back into clauseswhen they are not full clauses (save for “last yesterday” 
which is a temporal adverb with scope over most of the story). What I have 
produced here, then, are what I will call idealized lines.
 Idealized lines are useful when we are interested in discovering 
meaningful patterns in people’s speech and in getting at their basic 
themes and how they are organized. Using them does not mean that we 
have totally ignored the more superficial patterns of the actual speech. In 
fact, we can use hesitations, pauses, dysfluencies, and non-clause lines as 
indicators of how planning is working, where stanza boundaries exist, and 
how the speaker views her information at a micro-level. In actual analyses 
we always shuttle back and forth between the actual lines and idealized 
lines.
 Processing and Organizing Language 139
A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHILD’S STORY
I. SETTING
STANZA 1
 1. Last yesterday in the morning
 2. there was a hook on the top of the stairway
 3. an’ my father was pickin’ me up
 4. an’ I got stuck on the hook up there
STANZA 2
 5. an’ I hadn’t had breakfast
 6. he wouldn’t take me down
 7. until I finished all my breakfast
 8. cause I didn’t like oatmeal either
II. CATALYST
STANZA 3
 9. an’ then my puppy came
10. he was asleep
11. he tried to get up
12. an’ he ripped my pants
13. an’ he dropped the oatmeal all over him
STANZA 4
14. an’ my father came
15. an’ he said “did you eat all the oatmeal?”
16. he said “where’s the bowl?” 
17. I said “I think the dog took it” 
18. “Well I think I’ll have t’make another bowl” 
III. CRISIS
STANZA 5
19. an’ so I didn’t leave till seven
20. an’ I took the bus
21. an’ my puppy he always be following me
22. my father said “he—you can’t go” 
STANZA 6
23. an’ he followed me all the way to the bus stop
24. an’ I hadda go all the way back
25. by that time it was seven thirty
26. an’ then he kept followin’ me back and forth 
27. an’ I hadda keep comin’ back 
IV. EVALUATION
STANZA 7
28. an’ he always be followin’ me 
29. when I go anywhere
30. he wants to go to the store
 140 Processing and Organizing Language
31. an’ only he could not go to places where we could go
32. like to the stores he could go 
33. but he have to be chained up
V. RESOLUTION
STANZA 8
34. an’ we took him to the emergency
35. an’ see what was wrong with him
36. an’ he got a shot
37. an’ then he was crying
STANZA 9
38. an’ last yesterday, an’ now they put him asleep
39. an’ he’s still in the hospital
40. an’ the doctor said he got a shot because
41. he was nervous about my home that I had
VI. CODA
STANZA 10
42. an’ he could still stay but
43. he thought he wasn’t gonna be able to let him go
 This girl’s story has a higher-order structure made up of a SETTING, which 
sets the scene in terms of time, space, and characters; a CATALYST, which 
sets a problem; a CRISIS, which builds the problem to the point of requiring 
a resolution; an EVALUATION, which is material that makes clear why the 
story is interesting and tellable; a RESOLUTION, which solves the problem 
set by the story; and a CODA, which closes the story. Each part of the story 
(except the Evaluation and Coda) is composed of two stanzas.
 In some ways this is the structure of all stories, regardless of what culture 
or age group is telling them. However, there are also aspects of story structure 
that are specific to one cultural group and not another. For example, devoting 
a block of information to an Evaluation prior to a story’s Resolution is 
more common among some African-American (young) children than it is 
with some other groups of children. Adults tend to spread such Evaluation 
material throughout the story or to place it at the beginning, though African-
American adults engage in a good deal of “performance” features, which are 
a type of Evaluation, and tend to use Evaluation material to “key” a hearer 
into the point of the story, rather than to hit them over the head with the 
point bluntly indicated. Of course, such cultural information is never true in 
any very exclusive way: there are many varieties of African-American culture, 
as there are of any culture (and some African-Americans are in no variety of 
African culture, but in some other variety of culture or cultures). And other 
groups do similar or overlapping sorts of things.
 Another aspect of this story that is more specific to African-American 
culture, though also in a non-exclusive way, is the large amount of parallelism 
 Processing and Organizing Language 141
found in the way language is patterned within the stanzas. Note, to take one 
example of many, how stanza 3 says “an’ then my puppy came” and then gives 
four things about the puppy, and then stanza 4 says “an’ my father came” 
and then says four things (all of them speech) about the humans involved. 
This parallel treatment of the father and the puppy forces the hearer to see 
the story as, in part, about the conflict between the puppy as a young and 
exuberant creature and the adult world (home and father) as a place of order 
and discipline. As a seven-year-old child, the teller of the story is herself 
caught in the conflict between her own urges to go free and her duty to go to 
school and ultimately enter the adult world. 
 Notice that the part of the story labeled Evaluation makes clear that the 
essential problem with the puppy is that he wants to freely go places where 
he cannot go, just as, we may assume, a child often wants to go where she 
is not allowed to go and must go where she doesn’t want to go. In line 21, 
the child says “my puppy he always be following me,” and repeats this in the 
Evaluation. This “naked be” is a form in African-American Vernacular English 
that means an action is habitual (regularly happens). Here it indicates that 
the puppy’s urge to follow and go with the girl is not just a once or sometime 
thing, but a regular and recurrent event that follows from the nature of the 
puppy. It is a problem that must be resolved. 
 The resolution of the conflict between the puppy and the adult world 
takes place at a hospital where a doctor (an adult) gives the puppy a shot 
and puts him to “sleep.” Thus, the adult world dictates that in the conflict 
between home and puppy, the adult norms must win. The child is working 
through her own very real conflicts as to why she can’t have her puppy and, 
at a deeper level, why she must be socialized into the adult world of order, 
duty, and discipline (by the way, the hook in the first stanza is just a dramatic 
device—the child is simply trying to say that her parents require discipline 
in the home; she is not, by any means, accusing anyone of mistreatment. The 
girl may also mean in stanza 2 that the father would not get her down until 
she agreed to go finish her breakfast). This, in fact, is the basic function of 
narrative: narrative is the way we make deep sense of problems that bother us.
 Linguists and psychologists have proposed many other approaches to the 
higher-order structure of stories and other connected sorts of language (exposition, 
argument, description). But they all agree that such connected blocks of infor-
mation are stored in the mind in terms of various “body parts” and that, in telling 
or writing such information, we often organize the information in terms of these 
parts, though of course we can actively rearrange the information as we produce 
it and we often discover structure in information as we produce it.
Macro-lines
So far I have used a young child’s story as my source of examples of lines and 
stanzas. Lines and stanzas are often quite easy to find in children’s language. 
 142 Processing and Organizing Language
With adults, complex syntactic structures within and across sentences 
sometimes make it harder to find the boundaries of lines and stanzas. Adults 
sometimes use the syntactic resources of their language to get lines and 
stanzas to integrate tightly with each other, to meld rather smoothly together. 
Indeed, in such language the beginning of the stanza is